ere arranged by
a man of genius, after careful forethought, and upon a special design.
Napoleon built upon a clear stage which the French Revolution
bequeathed him. The originality once ascribed to his edifice was indeed
untrue; Tocqueville and Lavergne have shown that he did but run up a
conspicuous structure in imitation of a latent one before concealed by
the mediaeval complexities of the old regime. But what we are concerned
with now is, not Napoleon's originality, but his work. He undoubtedly
settled the administration of France upon an effective, consistent, and
enduring system; the succeeding governments have but worked the
mechanism they inherited from him. Frederick the Great did the same in
the new monarchy of Prussia. Both the French system and the Prussian
are new machines, made in civilised times to do their appropriate work.

The English offices have never, since they were made, been arranged
with any reference to one another; or rather they were never made, but
grew as each could. The sort of free trade which prevailed in public
institutions in the English Middle Ages is very curious. Our three
courts of law--the Queen's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the
Exchequer--for the sake of the fees extended an originally contracted
sphere into the entire sphere of litigation. Boni judicis est ampliare
jursdictionem, went the old saying; or, in English, "It is the mark of
a good judge to augment the fees of his Court," his own income, and the
income of his subordinates. The central administration, the Treasury,
never asked any account of the moneys the courts thus received; so long
as it was not asked to pay anything, it was satisfied. Only last year
one of the many remnants of this system cropped up, to the wonder of
the public. A clerk in the Patent Office stole some fees, and naturally
the men of the nineteenth century thought our principal Finance
Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, would be, as in France,
responsible for it. But the English law was different somehow. The
Patent Office was under the Lord Chancellor, and the Court of Chancery
is one of the multitude of our institutions which owe their existence
to free competition, and so it was the Lord Chancellor's business to
look after the fees, which of course, as an occupied judge, he could
not. A certain Act of Parliament did indeed require that the fees of
the Patent Office should be paid into the "Exchequer"; and, again, the
"Chancellor of the Exc