w. G. MILLER'S PHILOSOPHY OF LA jr. Politics, but it must be a special branch of Politics, not merely a special aspect. What strikes an English lawyer about systems of Nat'/rr-'-ht is that the lines between Ethics, Politics, and Juris- prudence, are nowhere adequately drawn. An engineer ought to be grounded in the general principles of mechanics. But you cannot learn how to make or drive a steam-engine out of Thom- son and Tait's Natnri.il Philosophy. The philosophers do not seem to see that jurisprudence is quite as much a special study as en- gineering. And so, in the theory of Jurisprudence itself, the consideration of the fitting scope and purposes of law the teleo- logy of law, or, in Bentham's hardly adequate phrase, the theory of legislation is not clearly distinguished from the analysis of legal institutions and ideas as they exist in a given stage. If the English school has done nothing else, it has made a serious endeavour to work out these faintly perceived lines, to effect this unfinished distinction. Austin did not, in my opinion, make any advance at all upon Hobbes in the theory of politics. But he did make an advance and made it all the better, perhaps, for the hardness and narrowness of his view towards the clear con- ception of a theory of law distinct both from the theory of politics proper and from the theory of legislation which forms the connecting link. Not that he always applied his own dis- tinction with success. Very few speculators do. For example, he tried to account for federal constitutions with his theory of sovereignty ; a desperate or all but desperate enterprise on the face of it, inasmuch as a federation of states which preserve their individuality must have a kind of international character, and Austin had expressly excluded international relations from his conception of law. Being undertaken, however, this enterprise leads Austin (without his knowing it, apparently) clear out of the field of positive law to which he anxiously sought to confine himself, and into the field of politics and very doubtful politics too. But such failures in detail, once found out, count for very little. Of course they must be criticised until people have left off defending them ; and as Austin still has worshippers, I fear the stage of criticism is not past. Yet I would fain hope, for my own part, that the time is within sight when Austin may be put on the shelf for the respectful remembrance of teachers, and the release of students ; having secured us in possession of the truism (which experience has shown transcendentalism to be strangely capable of obscuring) that for lawyers at any rate there is a highly material difference between those rules which are enforced by courts of justice and those which are not. As to Mr. Miller's philosophy, he reviews the contents of posi- tive law with sufficient store of illustration (and, be it said in passing, with too many citations of a second-rate or trivial kind, perhaps intended and if so, ill-advisedly to make the work more popular with students), in a fairly readable style, and in an inconvenient and non- juristic order, to use a barbarous term for
