Note 48 — Chapter CV · THE KING'S BENCH PRISON.

"The Code Napoleon is sometimes declared to be a failure; but it has been no failure. In place of the previously differing laws of the provinces of the ancient kingdom it has substituted a consistent uniform code for the entire of France. But it is urged, that it has been buried under a load of commentaries. Of course there has risen a pile of judicial constructions, as must be the case with the text of every code. But these constructions have a platform to rest upon, framed in the light of modern science. Ours are wholly different; they have no such foundation to settle upon: they rest upon a mingled heap of rubbish and masonry, of obsolete laws and laws in force. Even the basement storey has not been firmly laid, as in France. This, however, it is that the nation requires to have done; it requires an entirely new legal edifice to be erected. All that is good in the past it would have preserved under a new and better arrangement; and then the mass of statutes, reports, and text-books from which the analysis had been made, and which had long embarrassed both the learned and unlearned—declared by parliamentary authority to be no better than waste paper—null and void, and no more citable for any purpose of legal argument, illustration, or decision."—Black Book of England.