and to discern the true basis for prophecy.  Therefore, it is well to have an accurate notion of what you mean by law, by a right, by a duty, by malice, intent, and negligence, by ownership, by possession, and so forth.  I have in my mind cases in which the highest courts seem to me to have floundered because they had no clear ideas on some of these themes.  I have illustrated their importance already.  If a further illustration is wished, it may be found by reading the Appendix to Sir James Stephen’s Criminal Law on the subject of possession, and then turning to Pollock and Wright’s enlightened book.  Sir James Stephen is not the only writer whose attempts to analyze legal ideas have been confused by striving for a useless quintessence of all systems, instead of an accurate anatomy of one.  The trouble with Austin was that he did not know enough English law.  But still it is a practical advantage to master Austin, and his predecessors, Hobbes and Bentham, and his worthy successors, Holland and Pollock.  Sir Frederick Pollock’s recent little book is touched with the felicity which marks all his works, and is wholly free from the perverting influence of Roman models.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.  At least in my day I had my share of such counsels, and high among the unrealities I place the recommendation to study the Roman law.  I assume that such advice means more than collecting a few Latin maxims with which to ornament the discourse—­the purpose for which Lord Coke recommended Bracton.  If that is all that is wanted, the title De Regulis Juris Antiqui can be read in an hour.  I assume that, if it is well to study the Roman Law, it is well to study it as a working system.  That means mastering a set of technicalities more difficult and less understood than our own, and studying another course of history by which even more than our own the Roman law must explained.  If any one doubts me, let him read Keller’s Der Romische Civil Process und die Actionen, a treatise on the praetor’s edict, Muirhead’s most interesting Historical Introduction to the Private Law of Rome, and, to give him the best chance, Sohn’s admirable Institutes.  No.  The way to gain a liberal view of your subject is not to read something else, but to get to the bottom of the subject itself.  The means of doing that are, in the first place, to follow the existing body of dogma into its highest generalizations by the help of jurisprudence; next, to discover from history how it has come to be what it is; and finally, so far as you can, to consider the ends which the several rules seek to accomplish, the reasons why those ends are desired, what is given up to gain them, and whether they are worth the price.