The Sun.
London, England, 1859-05-12 00:00:00

THE SUN.

THURSDAY, MAY 12, 1859.

We are told that the Austrians have retraced
their footsteps, and, having evacuated many im-
portant positions, have recrossed the Sesia "in great
haste, leaving part of the loads of forage, &c., which
they had demanded, behind them." This may be
true, but still it rests solely on Sardinian authority.
The only telegrams are from Turin, and it is noto-
rious that on all questions relating to the war the
communications by the electric wires cannot be
relied on. That such events may have happened is
by no means improbable. The Austrians, having
commenced the war, have exhibited a miraculous
disposition to retreat. They are by no means dis:
posed to waste powder or cross bayonets with their
opponents. They have, even at the eleventh hour,
adopted a Fabian policy, although it was to avoid
such a course that they recklessly engaged in a war
by which they must inevitably be the chief
sufferers.

That France is in earnest, and resolved to make
important changes in the Treaties of 1814-15 is
certain. Moreover, that the EMPEROR must be satis-
fied he can do so is manifest from the fact that he
has taken the command of his army, and is de-
sirous of acquiring the laurels which he fancies may
easily be won from such sluggish opponents. He
may, however, "reckon without his host." The
Austrians, though slow, are tolerably sure, and
they will oppose a fierce resistance to any entry of
French troops beyond the boundaries of Piedmont.
It is, we believe, the vacillating • and divided
councils of the Cabinet of Vienna that has occa-
sioned this grave mistake. General GYULAI had a
powerful army under his command, quite sufficient
to have taken possession of Turin, and to have
assumed t position from which he could not easily
have been dislodged, and which must have proved
very injurious as well as annoying to VICTOR
EMMANUEL and his subjects between the Ticino
and the capital. But, in place of availing himself
of these golden opportunities, he has remained in-
active, and relinquished'the chances which he
might have realised. " Too late " will henceforth
be his motto. But in justice we must express our
belief that the error is attributable to the Cabinet
of Vienna rather than to the General in Italy.

The French people have responded willingly to
the call Oirthaf libaxded savings. As we have
already stated, every Frenchman, even to the most
humble labourer, is ambitious of becoming a
" rentier." The mere title confers a certain
amount of dignity, and there are few who cannot
contrive, to purchase to the amount of ten francs
rentes, or Bs. per annum, by the advance of some
200 francs, or £8 sterling. Sfiould they not have
the means themselves, they can readily find
neighbours willing to participate in this eight
shillings a year by a loan.

The people, however, who were supposed to be
adverse to anything in the shape of war—whose
sons or brothers will be naval or military conscripts
engaged to carry out the ambitious projects of the
third NAPOLEON—are the most ready to come for-
ward with " the sinews of war." The mere notion
of another BONAPARTE commanding an " Army of
Italy"—the, memories of Marengo, and a series
of other triumphs, have induced them to draw
on their private cabinets, and to bring forth
the treasures of which even their nearest and
dearest friends and relatives were kept in perfect
ignorance.

Sometime since we observed in a very able
financial report of M. FOULD, in which
he pointed out that a very large amount
of bullion had been
imported into France beyond
the value of the exports. We then pointed oat that
the fact was in a great degree ascribable to the
national love of hoarding, So many revolutions
and changes have happened, so many men have
been driven into exile or imprisonment, that
every one desires to put something aside for
the rainy day, so as to be prepared for
the emergency whenever it may arise. They
do not, however, like losing handsome in
terest. Five per cent. in public securities
is a talismanic expression to every one throughout
the length and breadth of the land, and that

A photographic likeness of Lord BROUGHAM,
cleverly engraved and recently issued to the public
by one of our pictorial contemporaries, affords an
admirable and really life-like illustration to a
memorable apostrophe uttered now nearly thirty
years ago by the Rev. SYDNEY SMlTH—namely,
in 1830, when the subject of this apostrophe was
seated upon the Woolsack as England's Lord High
Chancellor. " Look at the gigantic BROUGHAM,"
exclaimed SYDNEY SMITH, in that year auspicious
for Reform—" Look you to BROUGHAM, and turn
you to that side where he waves his long and lean
finger, and mark well that face which nature has
marked so forcibly—which dissolves pensions, turns
jobbers into honest men, scares away the
plunderer of the public, and is a terror to
him who doeth evil to the people !" Since
those NN ords were uttered by the great
Wit, himself also in his way, too, a great Reformer,
Lord BROUGHAM has toiled vigorously at what
must be regarded as his one particular metier, that
of a Reformer, the greatest of all the Reformers of
the laws of his country. Although the genius of
this intellectual giant has meanwhile penetrated
into almost every other department of human
knowledge—this one of legal reform is generally
recognised as among them all what our neighbours
would term his specialty. As a statesman, as a
judge, as an advocate, as an orator, as a man of
science, as a man of letters, he has won for
himself a distinguished reputation. As a law
reformer he stands amongst us altogether without
rival or competitor. Of the splendour at once of his
scientific and of his oratorical attainments Lord
BROUGHAM a few months back, we all remember
full well, offered the world superb evidence in his
remarkable speech, upon the inauguration at
Grantham of Sir ISAAC NEWTON'S monument.
Alluding to that noble oration, M. FORCADE has
recently observed in the Revue des Deux Mondes,
that it is wonderful how a man who has already
attained his eightieth year, after a career so labori-
ous and agitated, should yet afford thus late so
remarkable an example of energy and youthful
animation—" C'est une merveille qu'un homme qui
atteint a sa quatre vingtieme annee puisse encore,
apres une vie si pleine et si agitee, donner un aussi
op lendide exemple de vigneur et de jeunesse
d'esprit." Almost simultaneously with that extra-
ordinary evidence of unabated power in the mastery
of the profoundest scientific research and of the
loftiest resources of oratory, there was given to the
world by Sir EARDLEY WILMOT a substantial and
enduring monument of Lord BROUGHAM'Sherculean
labours during his long life as a Legal Reformer—
as the greatest of all our Legal Reformers. This
was nothing less than a ponderous volume, extend.
ing to nearly 900 pages octavo, comprising within
it the Acts and Bills passed by this one man

(between 1811 and the present time) through the
Imperial Parliament. Improvements in the laws of
England, beginning nobly in 1811 with BROUGHAM'S
glorious bill, proclaiming the crime of slave-dealing
to be felony ! From that time to the present, during
nearly one entire half century, this one reformer
has added Act after Act, Bill after Bill, to
the Statute Book—the stones of that great
pyramid of legal improvement, which will attest
his fame to after generations.
These systematic efforts at legal reform we are
still in the midst of. Au association organised for
the purpose of carrying them out, yet more syste-
matically, holds its meetings periodically at No. 3,
Waterloo-place, Pall-mall. Of that society Lord
BAOUGIII3I is, as a matter of course, the honoured
President. He is still toiling on at its head, at a
task to all appearance interminable—getting bit by
bit, improvement after improvement.

Latterly, while these labours in the way of Legal
Reform have been thus appreciably advancing—
there has grown up, not very surprisingly, an
earnest desire on the part of some that our cumbrous
and complex system of Laws, written and unwrit-
ten, Common and Statute, should at length, by one
grand and compendious effort, be condensed and
codified. At any rate, if a distinct Code has been
despaired of by the less sanguine, a Digest of the
law now existing has been almost universally de-
manded. A medium course, about a century ago,
was sketched out by the wise hand of Dr. JOHNSON,
when that great man observed that the Scylla and
Charybdis between which legislative ingenuity
might yet discover, though it never has yet disco-
vered, a free passage, were—on the one hand, the
imperilling of justice by reposing too implicit a
reliance in the discretion of its administrators ;
and, on the other, embarrassing justice by
a needless and bewildering multiplicity of
provisions. There is the difference, as of
the " poles asunder," as of " zenith and
nadir"—between, let us say, the compact yet
comprehensive Code Napoleon and our own wilder-
ness of law, of both kinds, the lex scripta, extend-
ing over forty or fifty quarto volumes of statutes,
and the lex non scripta, scattered through the
almost numberless decisions of the courts and books
of the famous text writers. The feasibility as well
as the desirability of a compendious code was main-
tained last year by Lord JOHN RUSSELL, as Presi-
dent of the law section, during the deliberations of
the Society for Promoting Social Science, held dur-
ing the autumn of 18.58, at Liverpool. The im-
practicability of any such scheme, on the other
hand, was virtually insisted upon exactly thirty
years previously by the then Solicitor-General, the
late Chief Justice TIDAL, who insisted in the
House of Commons, in 1828, that " the commerce
and establishments of this country are of such a
nature that our laws must necessarily be of a com-

plicated nature. A simple code of laws," added Sir
NICHOLAS TINDAL, " would answer well for a
simple state of society, but," said he, " if you wish
to make your laws beforehand—if you wish that
they should have a perpetual operation—then, I
say they must of necessity be of an intricate and
complicated nature." Nay, further, TINDAL then
added—" Why, Sir, we have at this moment more
law in a single turnpike bill than would be suffi-
cient to govern our Indian territory under any of its
ancient dynasties. And why is this? It is because
we wish to leave as little as possible to the discre-
tion of our judges." Between the aspiration of
Lord JOHN and the dread of Sir NICHOLAS lies the
very medium course indicated by the wise hypo-
thesis of Dr. JOHNSON. Might not that delicate
intermediate line be yet traced out ? Never, per-
haps, than at the present period, could be found a
better opportunity ! Now is,: assuredly, the very
time when a commission ought to be appointed by
the Crown and the Government—a commission
composed of the greatest and wisest law reformers
of our age—a commission charged with the duty of
discovering what might best be accomplished in the
way of a Digest or a Code of the Law of England.
As Chairman of the Commission—Lord BROUGHAM.
Associated with Lord BROUGHAM the legal glories
of the elder generation, and the legal glories of the
younger generation—profound lawyers and veteran
statesmen, like Lord LYNDHURST and Lord ST.
LEONARDS, gifted and eloquent and ingenious
chiefs of a later school, such as the hon. and learned
member for Belfast, and the hon. and learned mem-