Review of Periodicals declaring that "the validity of any decision shall not be challenged by prohibition or otherwise." The effect of this provision seems to be to clothe an inferior tribunal with such powers as place it entirely outside the control of higher courts, which cannot review its pro ceedings even for the purpose of determin ing whether the court has exceeded its jurisdiction. While it might seem at first that such a statute might be uliravires of the New South Wales Parliament under the constitu tion, the English statutes have given the Parliament large discretion in the administrtation of justice. The author says:— "Even if some slight excess of jurisdiction take place, owing to the honest mistake of the presiding Judge, this may be preferably in the public interest, rather than that the usefulness of the Court should be hampered and perhaps destroyed by repeated applica tions of the writ of prohibition on highly technical grounds." Responsibility. "Responsibility in Law." By R. W. Rankine Wilson. 34 Law Magazine and Review 167 (Feb.). The concluding paper in a series which has now been issued in book form. The author's purpose is to make an inquiry into the nature of moral responsibility. Some of the conceptions of Professors James and Royce are considered. Scientific Methods. "The Relation of Political Science to History and to Practice." By the Rt. Hon. James Bryce. 3 American Political Science Review 1 (Feb.). In his presidential address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Political Science Association at Washington, D. C, Jan. 28, Mr. Bryce says that the reason why many writers on political science are such hard reading may be because they "keep us too much in the field of abstractions." The best writers are those who bring us closely in contact with human facts. Montesquieu is sometimes wrong in his facts and often wild in his conjectures, but he is always interest ing. The same thing may be said of some writings of Tocqueville, Bagehot, Dicey, and Sidgwick. "That the study is, moreover, more in structive the closer it keeps to facts will appear when we consider the nature of the matter it deals with. Broadly speaking, it treats of Tendencies and of Institutions. The general and permanent tendencies of men in communities are the substratum of all political theory. We learn them from
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ethics and psychology as well as from history. Considered as general and as permanent they are few, and can be briefly stated "Every institution—say the English parlia ment or the New England town meeting,— must be studied through its growth and in its environment. Now in examining a political institution there are four things to be re garded. "The first is its formal and legal character. "The second is the needs it was meant to meet and the purposes it actually serves. "The third is the character of the men who work it. "The fourth is what may be called the traditional color of the institution itself, i.e., the ideas entertained respecting it by the people among whom it lives, the associations they have for it, the respect it inspires. "Without a comprehension of these three latter the investigation of the institution as a formal legal creation is unprofitable and may be misleading. The essential point is to get hold of the thing in its working. . . . "The accuracy of the science, its solid value, its usefulness to the world we live in, depend upon the closeness with which it keeps to the data supplied by history. It is not a deductive science any more than it is a branch of speculative philosophy. Some writers have treated it as a set of abstractions. . . . What can be more windy and empty, more dry and frigid and barren than such lucubrations upon sovereignty as we find in John Austin and somestillmore recent writers? Is this sort of treatment helpful today either to a comprehension of the facts, which is science, or to the service of mankind, which is statesmanship? . . . "A wide study of politics, like a wide study of literature, tends to correct the excesses of Nationalism. For a political philosopher as well as for a Christian the true spirit is a cosmopolitan spirit, which recognizes the good that there is in all peoples, the con tributions each of the civilized peoples has made, the services each may render in the future, the duty to help forward the races that are behind, the gain to each nation from developing the intellectual gifts and material prosperity of the others." . . . Standard Oil Company. See Corporations. Status. "The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution." By M. F. Morris. North American Review, v. 189, p. 82 (Jan.). The author, who was formerly Associate Justice of the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, considers that this amendment "has been the source and cause of untold calamity to our country." Status (Fifteenth Amendment). "Race Distinctions in American Law." By Gilbert Thomas Stephenson. 43 American Law Re view 29 (Jan.-Feb.). The first of a series of articles the purpose of which is to show that during the past
