The Beacon Lights of the Law ducing the rate of taxation by the income from this source. It has been even charged that records are falsified for the benefit of the contractors and the state. One woman convict was kept in the chain-gang for nearly twenty years, until she died from the suffering and hardships of her sentence. It was then discovered that her sentence should have ended in twenty months instead of twenty years, and the state has been called upon to make some reparation to her aged mother. • Recent investigations of this inhuman and barbarous system, where leased con victs are shamefully beaten and tor tured by their brutal bosses, have shown that we have some things in our country which are popularly supposed to be con-
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fined to the northeastern portion of Europe. Imprisonment as a corrective of the criminal and a preventive of crime has proven itself to be the most colossal failure ever invented for any purpose— and the burden of its failure falls most heavily upon the innocent wives and families of the offender. Probation for the accidental trans gressor and deprivation of liberty for the incorrigible, appear to furnish the only hope of equal justice for the guilty and the innocent. The criminal deprived of his liberty for the protection of society should be required to labor, and an equitable proportion of his earnings should by the state be turned over to his family for their support.
Chicago, Illinois.
The Beacon Lights of the Law* A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch By Frank E. Chipman, of the Minnesota Bar PROFESSOR MAITLAND tells us, in his introduction to Bracton's Note Book, that "twice in the history of England has an Englishman had the motive, the courage, the power to write a great, readable, reasonable book about the English law as a whole."1 The two that he refers to are Bracton and Blackstone, and we have called them the beacon lights of the law. •An address delivered before the American Asso ciation of Law Libraries, meeting at Bretton Woods, N. H., June 28 to July 4, 1909. 1Bracton's Note Boole, I.
BRACTON The biographical details about Brac ton are very meager. The place and year of his birth are unknown, though he was probably born in one of the small villages in Devonshire. The date of his death is in doubt, and the place of his burial in dispute. At the time of his death he was chancellor of Exeter Cathedral and is supposed to be buried there, although Collinson states that he was buried in the village church, at Minehead, with his effigy in long robes.2 •Somersetshire, II, 32.
