as the benefit of the law is felt in its ad he ministration, great encomium is due to the wisdom and integrity of the judge: is the living organ of the law, and on his intelligent and upright interpretation of its precepts much of the welfare of the community depends: there is, consequently, no department of science in which excellence more deserves to be applauded; and such names as HOLT, HARDWICKE, and MANSFIELD, will continue to be illustrious, while the able and impartial distribution of justice shall be thought an honour to the tribunals of a nation. In an age that has so peculiarly witnessed the pompous, but futile and disastrous pretensions of speculative policy, Englishmen need not be exhorted duly to estimate laws which include the soundest maxims of moral experience, and the juridical talents and probity that secure the efficacy of their application to the concerns of life. AN [1] ΑΝ ESSAY ΟΝ ΤΗΕ LAW OF BAILMENTS. HAVING lately had occasion to exa mine with some attention the nature and properties of that contract, which lawyers call BAILMENT, or A delivery of goods on a condition, expressed or implied, that they shall be restored by the bailee to the bailor, or according to his directions, as soon as the purpose, for which they were bailed, shall be answered, I could not but observe with surprise, that a title in our ENGLISH law, which seems the most generally interesting, H teresting, should be the least generally understood, and the least precisely ascertained. Hundreds and thousands of men pass through life, without knowing, or caring to know, any of the numberless niceties which attend our abstruse, though [2] elegant, system of real property, and with out being at all acquainted with that exquisite logic, on which our rules of special pleading are founded: but there is hardly a man of any age or station, who does not every week, and almost every day, contract the obligations or acquire the rights of a hirer, or a letter to hire, of a borrower or a lender, of a depositary or a person depositing, of a commissioner or an employer, of a receiver or a giver, in pledge; and what can be more absurd, as well as more dangerous, than frequently to be bound by duties without knowing the nature or extent of them, and to enjoy rights of which we have no just idea? Nor must must it ever be forgotten, that the contracts above-mentioned are among the principal springs and wheels of civil society; that, if a want of mutual confidence, or any other cause, were to weaken them or obstruct their motion, the whole machine would instantly be disordered or broken to pieces preserve them, and various accidents may still deprive men of happiness; but destroy them, and the whole species must infallibly be miserable, It seems, therefore, astonishing that so important a branch of jurisprudence should have been so long and so strangely unsettled in a great commercial country; and that, from the reign of ELIZABETH to the reign of ANNE, the doctrine of bailments should have produced more contradictions and confusion, more diversity of opinion and inconsistency of argument, than any other part, [ 3 ] [3] perhaps, of juridical learning; at least, than any other part equally simple. H 2 Such Such being the case, I could not help imagining that a short and perspicuous discussion of this title, an exposition of all our ancient and modern decisions concerning it, an attempt to reconcile judgments apparently discordant, and to illustrate our laws by a comparison of them with those of other nations, together with an investigation of their true spirit and reason, would not be wholly unacceptable to the student of English law; especially as our excellent BLACKSTONE, who of all men was best able to throw the clearest light on this, as on every other subject, has comprised the whole doctrine in three paragraphs, which, without affecting the merit of his incomparable work, we may safely pronounce the least satisfactory part of it; for he represents lending and letting to hire, which are bailments by his own definition, as contracts of a distinct species; he says nothing of employment by com mission |