sitors withdrawing their money from the banks for investment in other securities. The interest arising on money mentioned in the receipt to trustees to be calculated half-yearly up to November 20, and carried to account. The interest to trustees is to be £3 5s. per cent. per annum, while the interest payable to depositors is not to exceed £3 0s. 10d. Provisions are made in the Act as to minors and married women, and as to penny savings' banks and charitable societies. Members of friendly or charitable societies or penny savings' banks are not liable to any disability in those societies by subscribing to any other savings' bank under this Act. Depositors, with the exception mentioned, in one savings' bank are not to deposit in another, otherwise the deposit is to be forfeited to the Sinking Fund. Not more than £30 in one year is to be received, nor more than £150 in the whole. When the deposit and interest amount to £200 the interest is to cease. This, however, not to affect deposits of £200 on the 28th July, 1828. Money in one savings' bank may be transferred to another by a certificate. There are provisions in the Act respecting the payment of deposits to the representatives of persons who have died, and it is to be adapted to the law of Scotland.

All disputes are to be referred to the barrister appointed, and all documents are exempted from stamp duty. Various provisions have reference to banks in Ireland. The Act is not to affect PostOffice Savings' Banks. (The law relating to which has been amended. by an Act of the last Session, cap. 25). The Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt may appoint a barrister and employ clerks to carry out the Act, and the Treasury may authorise payment to be made, with incidental expenses, in the execution of the law for the amendment and consolidation of the laws relating to savings banks. It may be mentioned, in connection with this subject, that another Act of the last session, c. 25. made further provision for the investment of the moneys received by the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt from the Trustees of Savings' Banks established under the enactments of the Act 9 Geo. 4, c. 92.

DESCRIPTION OF ENGLISH LAW.

We take the following from an article in Mr. Dickens' "All the Year Round," which may amuse, if it does not instruct, the reader :

"ENGLISH LAW.

"We are accustomed to dilate upon our English law a little boastfully. We boast how, of all systems in this world of systems, it does the fullest and completest justice, though sometimes working

a little cumbrously in the process: how it is open to the poor man as well as to the rich man, with perhaps, if anything, a greater degree of openness for the poor man ; without taking any heed of the remark of Horne Tooke to the Chief Justice, reminding him of that splendid platitude, 'So is the London Tavern, my Lord !'

"But graver difficulties will naturally arise as to how this Perfection (of the Law) is to be brought before him. Her dimensions are so tremendous, and, worse than all, so straggling and irregular, that no tolerable view can be obtained of her proportions save under the conditions of a good series of years' study. Perhaps the readiest course would be to take the intelligent foreigner into one of the huge law libraries, and bid him look round; for that the Perfection hovers somewhere indistinctly in all that immensity.

"Where is he to begin? It is scarcely fair to point to any special work, which is no more than a brick of the universal Babel. We must offer him all, and not a fragment; he must have the whole library or none. Stay, a happy thought occurs. There are the works of a certain ripe lawyer, who wrote famous commentaries upon the laws of England, in four octavo volumes. Here is the key to the whole. Here is the essence in compact form, or compressed legal cake, exactly the thing for the intelligent foreigner. We take them down rejoicing, put them into his hands, and leave him engrossed with the clear style and cold comprehensive views of

"BLACKSTONE'S COMMENTARIES.

Allowing the foreign student a reasonable time to consider the theories of this excellent work, we return to hear what he has to say. The intelligent foreigner runs to meet us with delight, and with his finger on a curious passage; 'Mon Dieu! Le drole!' and other exclamations of a comic astonishment. He is infinitely delighted with a sort of legal pantomime, called 'suffering a recovery,' an elaborate trick for disposing of an estate, in which seller and buyer take sham parts; the seller, calling in a party known as 'the common vouchee,' craving leave of the court to imparl' with him in private,' which is, as usual, 'allowed him.' And soon after the demandant or buyer returns to court, but the vouchee' (played always by the crier) disappears, or makes default; whereupon judgment is given for the demandant,' &c. Then the aggrieved seller, for whom the absent vouchee vouched, has indeed a remedy for his lands thus lost by the default of the crier, in the shape of a judgment to recover lands of equal value of the crier alluded to, &c.

"For many centuries, as our intelligent foreigner will find, this little drama was regularly played out when a particular sort of estate had to change hands. Our bewildered stranger is anxious to

know about this sacred principle, and with serious embarrassment we have to inform him that the whole sacred mystery was by the stroke of a pen abolished one year of our Lord within the memory of many a flourishing 'Junior,' with all the sacred cases, reports, and decisions which hang by it. And, more remarkable still, its disappearance was unattended with the slightest inconvenience.

"Presently he comes to us again, bewildered by what the great Blackstone calls, 'the mutual altercations' between parties at law; that is, the wonderful system of pleading, singular and intricate. Brains have gradually worn away by detrition in pleaders' offices; grand and splendid suits have stood, or fallen, or been lamentably shipwrecked on 'points of pleading;' years and years of precious public time have been consumed in discussing their exquisite subtleties. In short, if it had been put to Lord Mansfield, or to Mr. Charles Butler of Lincoln's-inn, or to their spirits, by the intelligent foreigner, what they deemed the weft and tissue of British law, which could not be separated without destruction of the whole fabric, they would have answered reasonably-pleading! It turns up in every corner. Regiment after regiment of reports deal with it. It is the salt of the law. And yet we have the mortification of being obliged to tell the intelligent foreigner that of another morning in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty, another stroke of a pen swept away the whole of the system. Wonderful to relate, our legal system survived this dislocation, and within a few months was ruuning smoothly before the wind. Again must the intelligent foreigner be directed not to burden his mind with this lumber, again must he avoid certain shelves.

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"If there was anything that we took our stand upon, it was the grand English system of conveyancing.' What was that artful, yet mysterious, device known as a lease and release? The point of that pleasant device lies in the making of two voluminous instruments, by the first of which the purchaser pretends to become merely a tenant to the seller for one year. This relationship being duly perfected by all formalities, next day a new instrument is prepared, releasing to the tenant the regular freehold. There were, besides, thirteen other modes of leasing' property from one party to another, all of the most artful and ingenious sort, namely, by Bargain and Sale, Covenant to stand seised, Statute of Uses, &c.; when suddenly, a few years back, it occurred to some straightforward minds that, instead of these elaborate tricks, perhaps the simple course would be for the seller to convey his land by a plan deed ; and so, with another stroke of a pen, passed away quietly, and has never been missed.

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"Gravely, and with a certain pride, we tell our intelligent foreigner we are unwilling that the laws of England should be changed." But the fact is, the whole spirit of the law is change.

Chancery Only a few years ago the whole system was 'regulated' and remodelled. Common law? Some twelve years ago it was altogether built again afresh. Gone, too, those useful persons of the family of Roe (familiar John and Richard), who did such good service in ejectments. With what face could we explain to the inquisitive foreigner the function of these auxiliaries, or the absurd. childishness of that fiction long permitted to disgrace our law? Wou'd he be more inclined to pity or to laugh, when he was told that everyone bringing an ejectment had first to proceed, not against his tenant, but against an imaginary person of the name of Roe (Richard), and must proceed, not in his own character, but by the agency of another imaginary person, Doe (John)? One day the whole disappeared together, the waters covered John Doe and Richard Roe; with these vanished also Mr. Thrustout. So with wills; the whole procedure of which has been altered and repaired, and an enormous bulk of labour and learning made useless. So with Chancery procedure, wholly remodelled, and not to be recognised by that splendid legal obstructive, Lord Eldon, were he to return again to his woolsack. So with our procedure at trials, where plaintiff and defendant may now be questioned upon oath. So with bankruptcy; so with juries, whose wild vagaries have been wisely cut down and held in check by various processes. In short, the whole has changed, and is changing; and now the cunning legal artificers, trowel in hand, are actually casting about for fresh mutation. The law officers of the Crown are filled with schemes, and their pigeonholes bursting with undeveloped projects.

"This is scarcely encouraging for our intelligent foreigner. But we may, at least, take our inquiring Frenchman up to the splendid array of our written unwritten law,' and introduce him to the tremendous army of

"The progress of the model Briton is directed in the way he should go by two species of public guides: one, the plain palpable Act of Parliament: the other, a sort of custom, or common law, which is transmitted through the heads of a series of grand mystery-men,' and has no tangible existence whatever. As they, however, are supposed to have the secret of this airy code, which is transmitted from one to the other, there are certain skilled scribes always present, who carefully note down and record whatever drops from the mouths of the great mystery-men. To set our intelligent foreigner at large in such a prairie would be idle. There is neither beginning nor end, top, bottom, nor middle.

"But let us take our intelligent foreigner over to that row of noble folios and quartos known as

THE STATUTES AT LARGE.

"Here, at least, is what may be called plain sailing and clear pilotage. Here are the things which are to be left done, and the things to be left undone; simple directions and warnings. Here is for our foreigner the whole law Parliamentary; awfully voluminous, it is true, yet still tangible and complete. We are proud of this glorious and bulky monument. Yes, but let us look into it a little closer. "This enormous lump of written law consists of nearly fifty thousand Acts of Parliament, which regulate every conceivable relation of men and women. Some of these are perfect treatises, and some regular codes of laws. Some in terms say distinctly, Thou shalt not go from Jericho to Jerusalem,' and some say, as distinctly, Thou shalt go from Jericho to Jerusalem.'"

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"As may be well conceived, this mass does not regulate our life at the present time; and certainly life that had to be governed by fifty thousand statutes would soon become a burden. It is obvious that a large portion has been repealed in terms, or virtually; and, accordingly, when the Lord Chancellor, in '54, set some careful plodding men to grope their way through, only a total of some two thousand five hundred-possibly, by this time, reaching to three thousand-belonged to the kingdom strictly.

"These disorders, in fact, arise from the clumsy and u satisfactory way in which the process of manufacturing statutes is conducted. Any one who watches a bill through the House, and sees how clause after clause is debated, broken up, repaired, altered, and generally tinkered, and generally sent out damaged in sense and English, will not be surprised to learn how many bills, after this process, become utterly unintelligible and confused, and are withdrawn as worthless. More comical results ensue in a really good act, from hurry, and the confusion of many law-makers. Such are exactly analogous to that famous local prison act, one clause of which decreed that the new gaol was to be constructed out of the materials of the old, while another clause declared that the felons should be detained in the old gaol until the new one was completed !

"Early in George the Third's reign an attempt at consolidation was made with the highway acts. A gentleman, by way of experiment, very recently moulded all the poor-law acts into a single act of only one hundred and sixty clauses. And, as a more important instance, the criminal law of England and Ireland was only yesterday, with very little labour, thus consolidated into a convenient shape.

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The Lord Chancellor has now come forward with one of those rilliant, complete, and finished schemes, which are to law what Mr. Hladstone's periods are to finance. He proposes dealing with the eports as well as the statutes, and turning his labouring men -his