analogous to the history of any other European country, and least of all is it like that of England, where we are apt to judge of national, by constitutional, progress. Yet, advance there certainly was, if not unbroken, still persistent, and persistently unconnected with questions relating to the constitution.

The conclusions here stated with regard to the Scottish Parliament are, however, not entirely negative. The work of the Estates has left some positive and definite results of more than incidental character. The long series of administrative enactments, dealing mainly with police methods and with trade, helped the rise and growth of the Scottish burghs, and, even outside the burghs, they added something to the forces that made for peace and good order. There are occasional measures which found a lasting influence upon the character of the people. The Education Act of 1496, which provided that "all barons and freeholders that are of substance put their eldest sons and heirs to the schools, fra they be aught or nine years of age, to remain at the grammar schools until they be competently founded and have perfect Latin, and thereafter to remain at the schools of art and jure (i.e. the universities), so that they may have knowledge of the laws," forms a fitting conclusion to a century in which the spirit of poetry had deserted England for her northern neighbour, and in which the successors of Chaucer are to be found beyond the Tweed. It was not obeyed in the letter (although we do find the barons of the sixteenth century possessed of clerkly skill), but its influence may be traced in the provision for education made at the Reformation. Even when the definite results were less clearly marked, the existence, in the statute book, of words and phrases to which a constitutional meaning might conceivably be attached (like the existence of parliamentary institutions themselves), served as a rallying cry for men who desired reform, and gave to what was really a new demand the advantage of ancient tradition. As we proceed, we shall note some instances of this. The greatest and most lasting effect of the Scottish Parliament is, however, the judicial system of the country. Alone among European countries, Scotland still possesses a judicature which is the direct descendant of a Committee of the Estates. The College of Justice, which, in its present form, was established in the year 1540, ultimately derives its powers from the Scottish Parliament, which, in 1370, first appointed a small committee to deal with its judicial work. The system of Scots law, which the Senators of the College of Justice are appointed to administer, is, in so far as it differs from the law of England, the product, direct or indirect, of the wisdom of the Scottish Estates, working on the material supplied by the civil and the canon law. In the thirteenth century, the law of Scotland, which had supplanted the ancient customs of the Picts and Scots, was largely based on English law. The Saxon and Norman influences, which had altered the Scottish Church and the Scottish language, had introduced into Scotland many of the leading features of Anglo-Norman law. "It seems clear enough," says Professor Maitland,[6] "that, at the outbreak of the War of Independence, the law of Scotland, or of southern Scotland, was closely akin to English law. That it had been less Romanized than English law had been is highly probable: no Bracton had set it in order.... Romanism must come sooner or later; the later it comes the stronger it will be, for it will have gone half-way to meet the mediæval facts." We find, accordingly, that, later and stronger, the Roman law did come. After the War of Independence, Scottish lawyers borrowed little from England, and, gradually, important differences began to emerge. Mr. Hill Burton has pointed out that the statement, frequently made, that the civil law is part of the law of Scotland, "can only be true of those portions which have from time to time been incorporated with it." The selection of these portions and their local adaptation formed part of the work of the Judicial Committee of the Estates. No attempt was made to codify Scots law for forty years after the Judicial Committee had been constituted as the Court of Session, but, in 1574, a commission was appointed to investigate into the condition of the law and to report on what they considered "meet and convenient to be statute."[7] The source of such additions as those made in accordance with this enactment was the Roman law, and the result has been to produce many discrepancies between Scots and English judicial institutions. The distinction between law and equity, for example, so important in England, is unknown to Scots law, for there never arose in Scotland a separate series of courts to administer a common law differing from the Roman civil law. The fact that the College of Justice was, in theory, a Committee of the Estates, has produced some interesting results. The idea of appeal was unknown in Scotland, or almost so. The records of the Privy Council show that the acts of the Court of Session were sometimes rendered null and void by the Council,[8] but the Council in no way exercised an appellate jurisdiction. In the reign of Charles II, an attempt was made to create the Estates into a Court of Appeal from the College of Justice, and it failed, for the technical and historical reason that the Parliament had already delegated its powers to the Senators. At the Revolution, the Claim of Right demanded the introduction of some process of appeal, but the Union negotiations did not deal with the question, and when, about 1711, in a case between the Presbytery of Edinburgh and an episcopal clergyman, the House of Lords heard an appeal from the Court of Session, they afforded the first instance of an appellate jurisdiction in Scottish causes. It is another consequence of the parliamentary origin of the Courts of Law that the High Court of Justiciary still possesses authority "competently to punish (with the exception of life and limb) every act which is obviously of a criminal nature, though it be such which in times past has never been the subject of prosecution."[9] The English courts have no such powers of "declaring" a crime.

There are also such familiar technical differences as those relating to Conveyancing and the Law of Purchase, and such divergencies from English custom as the number of a Scottish jury, and its power to bring in a verdict which is not unanimous, or the judgment of "Not Proven," which is unknown to English law. But beyond all such debatable issues, there are many important respects in which the law of Scotland is more considerate of the rights of the weak than is the law of England. In questions relating to movable succession, for example, widows and children are protected from the eccentricities of death-bed piety; in cases of legitimacy and marriage the weak can claim privileges refused to them by English law; and with regard to divorce, the rights of husband and wife are equal. The principles of Scots law which protect