LORD WATSON.

LIVES spent in keen intellectual activity are often devoid of outward incident. Such was that of the late Lord Watson. He had no history, no personal ambition beyond that of leading a quiet country life. one of those

who care not to be great,

But as they serve or save the State.

He was

The son of a Scotch minister, educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh, admitted an advocate to the Scotch Bar in 1851, he slowly won his way to recognition by his acuteness and assiduity. At forty-seven Mr. Disraeli rewarded his steady Conservatism by appointing him Solicitor-General for Scotland; two years later he became Lord Advocate. As such he conducted the prosecution of the Glasgow Bank directors. In 1880 he succeeded to the vacancy caused among the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary by the death of Lord Gordon. Once in his proper sphere, each year made more apparent the greatness of his judicial genius, until, when his career closed, it is not too much to say that he was reputed one of the most profound and accomplished lawyers in the three kingdoms. Many men in his position would have been content to occupy themselves with Scotch appeals only. Lord Watson was not. Accident had made him a Scotch lawyer; he set himself to study English law, and he attained to a mastery of its principles and a familiarity with the intricacies of its case law as great almost as that of Lord Blackburn; witness his judgments in Nordenfeldt v. Maxim-Nordenfeldt Company, 1894, A.C. 535; Mogul Steamship Company v. M'Gregor, 1892, A.C. 25; Allen v. Flood, 1898, A.C. I. Mr. Bryce in his recent Studies dwells on the educational value of the civil law, on the good sense which distinguishes the Roman jurists, their large and liberal views of law, their philosophic spirit, and sense of historical development. Lord Watson was a striking example of the value of early training in the civil law. It furnished him, when he came to sit on the Judicial Committee, with the key to the legal puzzles constantly arising out of the systems of law which make up the legal mosaic of our Empire. "He was," says Mr. Haldane, addressing the Scots Law Society-"he was the Privy Council judge par excellence. His mind was wholly free from any tendency to technicality, and he never failed to endeavour to interpret the law according to the spirit of the jurisprudence of the colony from which the appeal came. If it was

a Cape appeal, he was a Roman-Dutch lawyer; if it was an Indian case of adoption, he entered into the religious reasons for the rule to be applied; if it was a Quebec case of substitution under the old French Code, or a Jersey appeal about the custom of Normandy, it was just the same. He imported none of the prejudices of the Scotch or English lawyer. In the House of Lords he was just as striking whether it was a Scotch appeal or an English case about some abstruse question of real property law. He was a great judge. For you his name will go down to posterity coupled with those of your great Scottish lawyers, the men of whom Inglis was the type. For us in England he will be recalled as one of the most superb judges that ever sat in the House of Lords. But the greatest memory of him will, to my mind, be that which must long be preserved in the distant colonies of the Empire, for which he was the embodiment, not only of a great legal intellect, but of absolute freedom from partisanship and of a passionate love of justice."

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EMPIRE AND

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ITS COUNCILS.

[An address delivered by the RT. HON. R. B. HALDANE, K.C., M.P., at a meeting of the Society held at the Royal Colonial Institute, June 13th, 1902.]

I WILL begin this paper by saying what I am going to try to do and what I am going to try not to do.

Among you are men who are engaged in actually moulding the Constitution of the Empire. If I venture to say to this meeting anything at all, it is, firstly, because a peg is needed on which to hang a discussion which will go much beyond the paper itself; secondly, it is because, although an unimportant watcher, I have been for nearly twenty years a close watcher of the growth of and increasing meaning of that Constitution which is more or less possessed in common by the different dominions of the Crown; I have observed as a student of constitutional lawI hope, if without bias towards the virtue of the mere student, at least without twist towards the vice of partisanship. So much for the study. But I have also seen a good many interesting things happen in my time, not only in the Imperial Parliament, but in the too little known laboratory of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. On these things I shall not dwell to-day, partly because I wish to make a virtue of necessity and be brief, and partly because in a little volume published recently I have ventured to reprint two discourses, one dealing with Federal Constitutions within the Empire, and the other with the political work of the Judicial Committee. I will, therefore, go straight to my point, and begin by seeking to express freely one or two not insignificant truisms.

The Unwritten Type of Constitution.-To begin with, the Constitution of the Empire, although it contains a number of subordinate Constitutions in different realms, contains them in process of being built up, and, as time elapses, more and more moulded in accordance with a common type. That type is unwritten and in consequence developing. The same traditions obtain in Australasia, in Canada, in South Africa, even to some extent in India. They are the outcome of a British way of looking at the relations of our executives to our legislatives. Even

when they begin in an apparently rigid Act of the Imperial Parliament, that Act turns out to have been a mere skeleton which has to be clothed with the flesh and blood of unwritten and growing usage if it is to have life. When such Acts have been successful, as in the case of the British North America Act of 1867 and the Australian Commonwealth Act of 1900, it is because they have been no more than the legal expressions of what was already potentially there, and because they were locally prepared and therefore ready for legal expression. When they have fallen flat, as in the case of the South African Confederation Act of 1877, it is because the Imperial Parliament had tried, with the best intentions, to make a legislative gift ab extra to people who had not at the moment asked for it and could not use it. The truth is, that more and more we are nearing the stage at which it will be realised that the Imperial Parliament in its relations to the self-governing dominions of the Crown can be, and ought to be, only a trustee of its powers. It is legally omnipotent, but in the reality of practice it is but an instrument for giving effect to the sense of the part of the Empire which calls for its interference. We have come to realise that if there are exceptions to this rule, it is only in cases where the interests of the Empire as a whole are mainly if not altogether concerned.

The Trusteeship of the Imperial Parliament.-Now this notion of trusteeship, a modern and important notion, is not, when looked at in the light of our unwritten traditions, a wholly novel one. We have several times worked out its application at home. Every student of constitutional history who takes the trouble to compare the immense powers of the Tudor sovereigns with those of the later sovereigns, who reign but do not govern, is familiar with the steps by which the monarchy has changed from an almost absolute one to a system in which the king has come to exercise his power in a fiduciary capacity. And this is not the only illustration. The House of Lords can to-day legally and theoretically amend a Money Bill. The Courts would be bound to recognise this power of amendment. But in practice a series of resolutions of the Commons, the effects of which are invisible to the merely legal eye, have abolished this power. They expressed the desire of the people of Great Britain, and because they did so the centre of political gravity became changed, just as in the analogous instance of the Crown, and the House of Lords has become bound by a series of silken bonds which are not the less binding because they are as invisible, except only to a tribunal which is not legal, as they are strictly of modern growth.

A similar process seems to be in course of development as regards the relations of the Imperial Parliament to colonial Governments. The last forty years have witnessed great changes, the outcome of which has been to do much to place colonial policy as well as general external policy outside the sphere of party contest in the home constituencies. It would to-day