But one man cannot do all that such a union of offices requires. It will be enough if his mind direct the agency of others to the same end. He should inform a well ordered body of officers by his purpose and by his energy. He has no business with detail or special cases, except by way of general direction, or by way of appeal and control. His officers should have their assigned functions, which should be well defined, and they should act as much as possible in public, or under public control. They should hold open sittings, be applied to in open Court, and they should, by reports to their chief, publish the operation and state of their respective jurisdictions.

We would substitute for those anomalous institutions called commissions committees or councils, to assist the Lord Chancellor, just as the Speaker of the House of Commons has one or more committees to assist him, and to these committees or councils should be attached executive officers, having the appropriate skill for the functions of their office.

The committees or councils should correspond with the distinct capacities or functions assigned to the Chancellor. They should be,

1. Judicial; 2. Executive; 3. Financial; 4. Administrative; 5. Legislative.

It should be the office of the judicial committee or council to assist the Chancellor as a Court of Appeal, and in the regulation of the judicial matters of his Court.

The members of the Court should sit separately in their own Courts, but it should be as the Judges of the Common Laws sit separately; in Banc and at Nisi Prius, or in Chambers, viz., to assist the Court at large. The want of personal intercourse among the members of the Court of Chancery has been productive of much of that vagueness of doctrine and practice which has obtained in Chancery.

The Executive Council should consist of all the officers of the Court, and have the immediate direction of all the affairs in detail. These officers should correspond in name and function to the like officers in the different departments of the State, and should, except so far as the real exigencies of

the Court should otherwise require, be governed by the same rules and practices.

It should be the office of the Financial Committee to take cognisance of all matters of finance, the investments of Suitors' Fund, the revenue of their estates, the Suitors' and the Fee Fund, and in short of all matters of Account.

It should be the office of the Administrative Committee to take cognisance of all matters of administration involving the discretion of the Chancellor. Of such a nature is the Chancellor's jurisdiction in the cases of infant wards, lunatics, and cestuique trusts, creditors' suits, bankruptcies.

It should be the office of the Legislative Committee to take cognisance of all legislative measures, especially such as relate to the administration of justice.

In the above, we have proposed no new thing: the functions for which provision is made are now performed by somebody, but those functions are scattered among many officers, and different offices are performed by the same persons casually and irregularly. It would be well to ascertain by whom and how these functions are performed, and where different offices are performed by the same person, to give him at once the names of those offices as if he were a Pluralist that it might be seen whether they were properly combined in the same person; and that the principles of action adopted in the exercise of the functions might not be tainted by considerations applicable to other functions with what they are associated, in consequence of such combination.

We have a word to say upon the Revenues of the Chancellorship. They have come to be considered as his personal revenue, but they are in the nature of a Civil List, and due to the State of the office.

In the administration of affairs (especially in a free country), it is not enough that the Potentate should be addressed afar off. He should come in some degree in personal intercourse with at least the chieftains of his department, and he should act by social as well as by official and political means. It is necessary that he should have some knowledge of the agents by whom he is to act - to know the men who are to be the

candidates for future promotion; and his revenues are in some measure due to that branch of service. Nor is it decent that this intercourse should take place at a private residence, built and arranged without reference to the occasion. We think it is to be regretted that the Chancellor has not an official residence, with proper apartments for his officers, instead of their being scattered here and there in bye places equally incommodious to themselves, to their chief, and to the public.

Nor would it be without benefit to those subordinate functionaries who are apt to regard themselves less as aids and satellites to their chief, than as recipients of the emoluinents of office. This at least is certain, that without a well arranged habitation or place of business for his officers, they will not be effectually organised. Should the Courts be rebuilt, the mansion of a minister of justice and his suitable office should be matters of prime concern.

It is doubtless very nice and pleasing to smaller people to see the modest demeanour of our Ministers of State, that they are so little different from other men; but it may be doubted whether, in losing something of the dignity of our chief officers of State, we have not lost also some of the power and energy by which those officers were made efficient instruments of the State purposes; whether, in short, that feebleness of purpose which has more or less characterised for many years statesmen of every class has not resulted in some measure from lowering the officers to the scale of their own. modest sense of their personal importance. We do not counsel the assumption of personal airs, but of official energy -that the minister should feel not that it is he, of such and such moral and mental dimensions who is acting, but it is the nation acting by and through him, and that it is the nation's dignity and not his own which he is called upon to sustain. This is certain, that if the duty be well and efficiently performed, the personal importance of the officer will be enhanced in public estimation, without any assumption on his own part.

This matter of the "Civil List" of the great officers of State, if considered in two parts, that is, in relation to the expenses of the office, and in relation to personal expenses

and private remuneration, would save much question as to official salaries, especially where the offices are filled by men without fortune. The latter would be relieved of some anxiety from the disproportion of their means to the required expenditure, and, what is equally important, from the imputation of making an office of dignity in too especial a manner a source of personal emolument.

Our concern is with the interests of the public-which depend on the efficient discharge of high offices of State, which, we conceive, depends in its turn upon a fair degree of social intercourse with the objects of their administration. And this, we repeat, being a public service for public objects, should not be made a tax on the private resources of the minister.

In conclusion. We must beg attention to all points of this programme. We press none, as all-sufficient. Every principle must have play; each will thereby be kept in due bounds, and the total result be in due proportion. The most careless reader must perceive how much more may be said on every point. Space would have forbidden, if other considerations did not, the Quixotic attempt to encounter beforehand all possible objection or to exemplify the matter by complete detail.

ART. VI.-LOANS ON LAND.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE LAW OF PROPERTY ON LOANS ON LAND.

THE following reference was made to this Committee:"To consider whether it would not be possible to organise an improved system for making Landed Property available as a security for advances of Money."

REPORT.

Or all legal questions affecting landed property, none perhaps is more important to the landowner, than those relating

to the affording facilities for obtaining advances of money upon the credit of his estates. The unwillingness of proprietors to part with their landed possessions makes the landowner, for the most part, more or less at some period of his life, a borrower; while the large amount of capital usually employed in the acquisition of land, and the low rate of interest which that capital in consequence produces, renders it in the highest degree important to him to procure advances of money at the lowest rate of interest which the state of the money-market allows. Now as the rate of interest, other things being the same, is dependent upon the security for the repayment of the capital, and as the very circumstance which makes it so important for the landowner to obtain advances of money at a low rate of interest,—that is to say, the high price which he has to give for his lands,—increases the security of the lender, by increasing the market value of his security, it would seem a natural consequence that the rate of interest upón which money could be obtained for investments on the security of land would be lower, or at least as low, as tha with which capitalists are contented in the case of any other investment. But in fact, the case is not so at this very moment, when the Three per Cent. Consols are at 977., and have for many months considerably exceeded 90%; that is to say, when this Stock has for some time paid less than 3 per cent., and now pays less than 3 per cent., the ordinary rate of interest paid by the landowner continues to be little less than 47. per cent; and that, in addition to the heavy expense which often attends the examination of his title, in addition to a considerable stamp duty upon the completion of his security.

If we ask why is this? the answer which must be given is, that the landowner is placed in this disadvantageous position by the operation of five causes, namely:

I. By the uncertainty attendant upon the investigation of the title to his land.

II. By the uncertainty as to the value of that land.

III. By the uncertainty as to whether the payments of the stipulated interest will be regularly and punctually made.