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principles. For the important centres of population, officers with a legal training sat by themselves as military magistrates to try the less important cases. In the outlying districts selected senior commanding officers dispensed justice in similar cases rather on the lines of the procedure adopted in their own orderly room for dealing with their own military offenders.

More serious offences were reserved for trial by "military courts" which imitated the procedure of Field General Court-martial. A day in the summary courts of Cologne or Bonn produced a series of cases in their number and character not very dissimilar from those with which a busy stipendiary magistrate deals at home,―breaches of curfew regulation, travelling without passes, minor cases of insulting behaviour to British troops or disobedience of military orders, pilfering of military stores, and smuggling.

Pilfering of military stores appears at the outset to have been a serious nuisance. The occupied area, after years of our blockade and the insistent demands of war, was nearly destitute of certain commodities. The petrol and motor car tyres, which the Army Transport brought with it in profusion, required without always receiving the most careful guarding, and "Being in unlawful possession of British military stores was a frequent charge against German inhabitants. One may perhaps surmise that the treatment of such offenders was less drastic, and possibly less effective, than the measures taken by the German army to protect its stores during the occupation of Belgium.

A special department of the army staff was set up under an officer who was styled a Military Governor to administer martial law in the occupied area. Much purely civil administration had also to be done in the difficult economic circumstances of the country. I visited the area myself on a fleeting occasion, and found everywhere confirmation of the reports received from many visitors, that the occupation was a most moderate and gentlemanly affair, and that the Germans, notwithstanding the blow to their pride, and some discomfort in providing the requisite billetting accommodation, had every reason to congratulate themselves on the results. The mere security against the revolutionary disturbances that took place on the other side of the Rhine was, I think, secretly admitted to be worth having.

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The whole of the ordinary civil administration was allowed and indeed required to continue. The local civil officials had remained at their posts in accordance with the terms of the Armistice and the orders to them were carry on." With disputes between Germans the Army of Occupation did not concern itself, and German courts continued to exercise jurisdiction under the authority of the Army Commander. But for the needs of the army and the limitations imposed by the separation of the occupied area from the rest of Germany the civil government was not changed. The greatest interference was probably in communications, the movement of troops and military supplies necessitating rigid control of railways.

I have, I hope, said enough to make it plain

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that in my view the improvisation of an adequate and, in the main, a merciful justiciary system, was not the least remarkable improvisation of the War. And perhaps I may be bold enough to justify my intrusion into this strictly military field by quoting from a letter which the Army Council addressed to me on August 7, 1919 :

"I am commanded by the Army Council to place on record their cordial thanks for the service you have rendered to the legal work of the army, especially in the revision of military courts-martial, a duty which, in addition to your other heavy work, you have undertaken for a period of four and a half years on behalf of five successive Secretaries of State for War. ... While maintaining the main principles of military law and standardising the decisions of the military tribunals, your influence was always exercised on the side of humanity."

It has seldom fallen to my lot to receive thanks which I valued as I value these.

XI

LAW REFORM

THE task of any Lord Chancellor in planning or carrying through schemes for legal reform is one of exceptional difficulty. Not only is he a Minister of the Crown and a member of the Cabinet, whom he must convince of the necessity as well as of the expediency of the measures which he proposes, but he must—if his reforms are to obtain acceptance in the profession of the law-act with the concurrence of great judicial personages and with the general assent of the instructed minds of the professions.

On the first point, legal reform has, I am glad to say, passed out of the domain of party politics. Proposals for the amelioration of the law receive from the Bench, the Bar, the solicitors' profession, and both branches of the Legislature, consideration upon their merits and without any regard to political consequences. And they have this further inestimable advantage, that each Lord Chancellor can take up the work where his predecessors left it and receive from them-as I have received-most cordial support and most sagacious counsel. Since the days of Lord Selborne and Lord Cairns, legal reforms have been dealt

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with in continuous fashion; and, though every Lord Chancellor must regretfully acknowledge to himself that the span of human life, and the still shorter span of life of the Administration of which he is a member, must deny him the satisfaction of bringing to fruition many of the projects with which he enters office, he knows that as he has tilled and watered the ground which has been prepared and sown by his predecessors, so those who come after him will continue the work upon which he has been engaged.

On the other hand, the mere fact that political interests and feelings are no longer involved in projects of law reform deprives the reformer of that momentum which is necessary to place measures upon the Statute-book in these days of crowded Parliamentary time. The matters dealt with are of first importance, and touch very nearly the life and work of all classes of the population; but they are in their nature technical and difficult to understand and cannot command the enthusiasm which was generated by the efforts of the reformers of the earlier nineteenth century.

Fortunately, the work of those reformers has now taken definite shape, and it is improbable that, in any time which can be foreseen, it will be desirable to touch the main framework of the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, however much changing habits and greater experience may lead us to desire any modification of details and a completion of some of the parts of that great edifice erected by Lord Selborne and Lord Cairns which remained unfinished when the zeal for law reform spent itself some time in the 'seventies.