to the so-called law of
nature or law of God. "No human laws," he says, "are of any validity if
contrary to this." His distinction between rights of persons and rights
of things, implying, as it would appear, that things as well as persons
have rights, is attributable to a misunderstanding of the technical
terms of the Roman law. In distinguishing between private and public
wrongs (civil injuries and crimes) he fails to seize the true principle
of the division. Austin, who accused him of following slavishly the
method of Hale's _Analysis of the Law_, declares that he "blindly adopts
the mistakes of his rude and compendious model; missing invariably, with
a nice and surprising infelicity, the pregnant but obscure suggestions
which it proffered to his attention, and which would have guided a
discerning and inventive writer to an arrangement comparatively just."
By the want of precise and closely-defined terms, and his tendency to
substitute loose literary phrases, he falls occasionally into
irreconcilable contradictions. Even in discussing a subject of such
immense importance as equity, he hardly takes pains to discriminate
between the legal and popular senses of the word, and, from the small
place which equity jurisprudence occupies in his arrangement, he would
scarcely seem to have realized its true position in the law of England.
Subject, however, to these strictures the completeness of the treatise,
its serviceable if not scientific order, and the power of lucid
exposition possessed by the author demand emphatic recognition.
Blackstone's defects as a jurist are more conspicuous in his treatment
of the underlying principles and fundamental divisions of the law than
in his account of its substantive principles.

Blackstone by no means confines himself to the work of a legal
commentator. It is his business, especially when he touches on the
framework of society, to find a basis in history and reason for all the
most characteristic English institutions. There is not much either of
philosophy or fairness in this part of his work. Whether through the
natural conservatism of a lawyer, or through his own timidity and
subserviency as a man and a politician, he is always found to be a
specious defender of the existing order of things. Bentham accuses him
of being the enemy of all reform, and the unscrupulous champion of every
form of professional chicanery. Austin says that he truckled to the
sinister interests and mischievous