The Rt. Hon. Sir Arthur Wilson,
K.C.I.E.

H. F. Wilson, Esq., C.M.G., Secretary
to the Orange River Colony.

Professor Westlake, K.C., Professor of The Hon. Mr. Justice Wright.
International Law, Cambridge.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE :

HONORARY SECRETARY:

EDWARD MANSON, ESQ., 8, Old Square, Lincoln's Inn.

EDITORS OF THE JOURNAL:

JOHN MACDONELL, ESQ., C.B., LL.D.
EDWARD MANSON, ESQ.

THE RIGHT HON. JAMES BRYCE, M.P.

We present the portrait of one well known to every reader of THE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LEGISLATION. Politics have of late seemed to claim Mr. Bryce for their own. They have, however, filled but a fragment of a singularly varied career. He has cultivated literature and history with signal success; he has been a traveller and explorer; long ago he won a great academic reputation; and more recently he has shown himself a skilful administrator and a powerful and ready debater. To describe concisely and accurately the place in English life of one who has attained a foremost place in the House of Commons, who has been Professor of Civil Law, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, President of the Board of Trade, and a Cabinet Minister-who has climbed Mount Ararat and has been President of the Alpine Club-who has written works so diverse as The Flora of the Island of Arran, The Holy Roman Empire, and The American Commonwealth-and who can address with ease a popular assembly in French, German, or Italian-is difficult. If he has found little leisure for the exercise of the legal profession, what he has written-notably his essays on Jurisprudence-make every lawyer his debtor. If Emerson's test of the very greatest works of literature-" And life was larger than before" their appearance-cannot be applied to all the books which have flowed from his prolific pen, two at least of them have become classics; and in the many years which have passed since their publication, their reputation has steadily grown. It is often a sore disappointment to Englishmen talking of their men of letters and lawyers with foreigners to find that names much extolled here are almost unknown beyond our borders. It is not so with Mr. Bryce. He is one of the very small group of Englishmen who are held in high honour by the scholars of France, Germany, and America. He is indeed everywhere known, and not least for his services to the causes which this journal seeks to further.

THE OLDEST CODE OF LAWS.1

[Contributed by PROFESSOR F. W. MAITLAND.]

The Gift of the Sun-God.-In a little book of less than a hundred pages Mr. Johns, who has rapidly been making a name for himself as an Assyriologist, has published an English version of what he justly describes as one of the most important monuments in the history of the human race. It is the code of laws given by the Sun-God to Hammurabi, a king of Babylonia who lived, so it is believed, in the third millennium before the Christian era. A block of black diorite, nearly eight feet high, is found at Susa by French explorers, and here is in English the sum and substance of what is engraved upon it.

We unfortunates must take Mr. Johns at his word, or if we compare his rendering with the work of Father Scheil or of Dr. Winckler, we are in no position to decide their differences. Only this can we say, that Mr. Johns appears to be wary and modest, and to be fully alive to the immense difficulties which beset a translator of legal documents. Readers of this journal know how hard it is to render into English some parts of the new German Code. We shall square the circle before we find the English words that exactly give the Reichstag's meaning, no more and no less. And yet in this case we are dealing with two kindred languages and with two communities which stand on the same level of civilisation. Hard indeed must it be, nay impossible, to find equivalents for the words of Hammurabi or of the Sun-God.

At

By-and-by we shall no doubt have commentaries and expositions. present we have a translation, which we trust the more because it is very bald, and a well-conceived index which is full enough to serve the purpose of an alphabetically arranged digest.

For the outsider, the man utterly ignorant of Assyrian history and of the Assyrian language, it would as yet be very perilous to say anything about the contents of the code. He thinks what nonsense he would make of the Twelve Tables, what untruth he would get out of the Lex Salica and the edict of Rothari, had not generations of scholars laboured 1 The Oldest Code of Laws in the World. Translated by C. H. W. Johns, M.A., Lecturer in Assyriology, Queens' College, Cambridge. (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1903.)