in the strictest sense. Who could fail to be interested in the transition through the priest's test of truth,[1] the miracle of the ordeal, and the soldier's, the battle of the duel, to the democratic verdict of the jury! Perhaps I might add, in view of the great increase of jury-waived cases, a later transition yet—to the commercial and rational test of the judgment of a man trained to decide.
It is still only the minority who recognize how the change of emphasis which I have called the law of fashion has prevailed even in the realm of morals. The other day I was looking over Bradford's history—the book which Mr. Bayard brought as a gift from Lambeth to the Massachusetts State House—and I was struck to see recounted the execution of a man with horrible solemnities for an offence which still, to be sure, stands on the statute book as a serious crime, but which no longer is often heard of in court, which many would regard as best punished simply by the disgust of normal men, and which a few would think of only as a physiological aberration, of interest mainly to the pathologist. I found in the same volume the ministers consulted as the final expounders of the law, and learnedly demonstrating that what now we should consider as needing no other repression than a doctor's advice, was a crime punishable with death and to be ferreted out by searching the conscience of the accused, although after discussion it was thought that torture should be reserved for state occasions.
To take a less odious as well as less violent contrast, when we read in the old books that it is the duty of one exercising a common calling to do his work upon demand and do it with reasonable skill, we see that the gentleman is in the saddle, and means to have the common people kept up to the mark for his convenience. We recognize the imperative tone which in our day has changed sides, and is oftener to be heard from the hotel clerk than from the guest.
I spoke of the scientific study of the morphology and transformation of human ideas in the law, and perhaps the notion did not strike all of you as familiar. I am not aware that the study ever has been systematically pursued, but I have given some examples as I have come upon them in my work, and perhaps I may mention some now by way of illustration, which, so far as I know, have not been followed out by other writers. In the Lex Salica[2]—the law of the Salian Franks—you find going back to the fifth century a very mysterious person, later[3] named the salmannus—the saleman—a
