Indeed, Sir F. Pollock and the late Prof. Maitland point out ('History of English Law,' vol. ii, c. 9, s. 4) that one view in this country has long been that the Judge

'stands like the umpire of our English games, who is there not in order that he may invent tests for the powers of the two sides but merely to see that the rules of the game are observed. It is towards this ideal that our English mediæval procedure is strongly inclined. We are often reminded of the cricket-match. The Judges sit in Court not in order that they may discover the truth but in order that they may answer the question "How's that?"'

In short, the House of Commons, which in 1907 rejected the proposal by 116 to 41, would have to be converted to the belief that to re-try a convicted person in a doubtful case where there has been some irregularity is compatible with fair play. In some cases it undoubtedly is.

Perhaps one suggestion may be diffidently hazarded. It is that legal aid, both that of counsel and that of solicitor, should be afforded, not indiscriminately but more freely than at present, to appellants who ask for it. Take this case, which occurred in 1908. A man convicted of murder prepared his own notice of appeal. His counsel at once stated that he could not support it, as 'it was opposed both to the defence [at the trial] and to the evidence'; and the Court, remarking that it must take the whole circumstances into account, including the statements in the notice, added, If this Court had had any doubt about the verdict on the evidence given at the trial, that doubt would have been settled by what the appellant had said in his notice' (Justice of the Peace Reports, Vol. 73, p. 11). It is obvious that, if a solicitor had advised this man, his case would have been presented very differently to the Court. Moreover, in less grave cases, the time of the Court is often wasted by the reading of long, rambling and incoherent writings by appellants, a large proportion of whom are quite illiterate and cannot express what they mean.

The evil goes even deeper. The Poor Prisoners' Defence Act (1903) permits both counsel and solicitor being assigned by the court of trial to a 'poor prisoner without expense to him; and the Court of Appeal has encouraged a more liberal grant of these facilities in

some classes of cases, but in practice it frequently happens that counsel alone is assigned. Now experience has shown that sometimes a convicted man, in such circumstances, loses his chance of appeal. It is not becoming for counsel, except in a very clear case, to urge his client to appeal, though he may think that some legal point might succeed. This, of course, he cannot discuss with the accused, even if he were not in prison, which he almost always is; it is impossible for defending counsel to carry on a correspondence with a man doing time.' But to a solicitor he can speak confidentially; and we are certain that many a prisoner would have appealed with success if he had had the services of a solicitor. It is too late to say that appeals on technical legal points should not be encouraged. There is a good deal of misconception on this head. It is not usually the case with indicted persons that they are quite innocent or quite guilty. They have generally done something wrong; pleas of guilty are frequently 'given away,' so to say, by ignorant persons who know that they are not morally innocent. But by our constitution the bad, as such, cannot be punished; we leave them to the laws of nature. The only practical justice is legal justice, whose most useful champion in many cases is a solicitor.

The outcome of our analysis is, then, that the new Court has been a valuable addition to the institutions of the country. It has been a boon to the profession above all, because it has inspired a secure sense that there is no point in criminal law, conspicuous or obscure, on which they cannot look to it for authoritative guidance. It has done a great work of co-ordination; to it in its sphere

'No high, no low, no great, no small;

It fills, it bounds, connects, and equals all.'

It carries on the immemorial English tradition of Justice with mercy. 'Spiritus intus alit.'

HERMAN COHEN.

Art. 6.-CICERO AND THE CONQUEST OF GAUL.

1. Ciceronis Epistolæ. Edited by Tyrrell and Purser. Vols. I and II. (Third edition.) Dublin University Press, 1906-1908.

2. Julius Cæsar. (Heroes of the Nations Series.) By W. Warde Fowler. Putnam, 1892.

3. The Greatness and Decline of Rome. By G. Ferrero. Translated by Alfred E. Zimmern. Vol. II. Heinemann, 1909.

4. Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul. By T. Rice Holmes. (Second edition.) Oxford University Press, 1911.

5. Cicero of Arpinum. By E. G. Sihler. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn., 1914.

CESAR'S conquest of Gaul may well be thought to be the most important event in the whole history of Western Europe; it settled once and for all the line between Latin civilisation and Teutonic barbarism; it laid the foundation for the French nation, the greatest of all Rome's great creations; it saved Mediterranean culture from the destroying flood which threatened to overwhelm it. The fact that the conquest led immediately to the destruction of the Roman Republic is in itself less important, for the Roman Republic was doomed to perish from its own internal weakness; but it is on this, the constitutional result of Cæsar's work, that our modern historians lay most stress.

The great series of campaigns which accomplished the conquest of Gaul has at last received adequate treatment in English. The 'De Bello Gallico' had too long been treated as a mere introduction to Latin; it had been used as a school book in which uninterested boys might be shown countless examples of ablative absolute and oratio obliqua. To Mr Rice Holmes belongs the credit of having produced a book which deals fully, and in an up-to-date manner, not only with the actual narrative, but also with all the problems, ethnological, geographical, social, which are raised by Cæsar's book. The second edition, the publication of which had been rightly secured by the Oxford Press, is not a mere reissue of the first; students of Cæsar ought to retain their old copy,

while getting the new one, for the first edition contains a good deal which has not been republished in the second. But one or other edition ought to be in the possession of every student of the great things in European History.

The conquest of Gaul, as it happens, falls within a decade of Roman History on which we have fuller information than on any other decade, except that immediately following it. It can even be claimed that, thanks to Cicero's letters and, to a small extent, to other sources such as Plutarch, we know this period better than we know any other period of history before the invention of printing. Now that the interest of our own nation is concentrated on the greatest of all wars, it may be worth while to compare the attitude of Rome to this great war, more especially as Cæsar's campaigns were fought in part on the present battlefields and, to some extent, for the same ends as our own.

There is no doubt that the events in Gaul were closely followed in Rome. Our information as to what was felt and thought there depends chiefly on the fact that Cicero had, during some three years of the period, as correspondents in Cæsar's camp, his brother Quintus, and his friend, the lawyer Trebatius. Unluckily it is only during a period of about twelve months, beginning with the spring of 54 B.C., that we have letters to them -thirteen to Quintus Cicero, and a similar number to Trebatius; why this is so, we can only conjecture. Still more unluckily, their answers, which would have been even more interesting to us, have not been preserved. The usual time that a letter from Gaul took to reach Rome was from twenty to thirty days; Cicero in September 54 B.C. receives a letter from Quintus on the twentieth day,' though rather oddly a time nearly half as long again, viz. twenty-eight days, was taken by a letter from Cæsar, which was written in the same

* Q. Cicero was at Ariminum on his way to Gaul in May 54 (Q. Fr., II, 12, 1, T. 139); he was there till the end of the campaign of 52 B.C. (Cæs. B. G., VII, 90), but unfortunately no letters to him in Gaul are preserved later than the beginning of the winter of 54 B.C. As to the letters of Trebatius we are a little more fortunate; the 'summer campaign' (æstiva) referred to in Ad Fam., VII, 14, 1, must be that of 53 B.C., though the letter is not dated. But in any case, the letters that bear directly on the Gallic campaigns concern only one single year-54 B.C.

month from Britain, to relieve Cicero's possible anxiety about his brother's long silence. It is characteristic of Cæsar's attitude to Cicero and of his humane courtesy that, even amid the anxieties of the British campaign, he made time to write this considerate letter. So again t we find Cicero anxious because a more than fifty days' interval' had elapsed since he had had letters or even any rumour.' As he had had Cæsar's letter of explanation, just referred to, less than a month before, Cicero must be considered a somewhat exacting correspondent. But his impatience shows at any rate how close was the intercourse between the capital and the seat of war.

On the whole, in matter of time, correspondence with Gaul compares quite favourably with our own correspondence with our men in Mesopotamia, and not altogether unfavourably with the letters which come from Salonica. It is true that Roman correspondence had other drawbacks which were worse than even our worries from the censorship; letters were apt to arrive in bundles as they do with our men at the front, and sometimes much out of date' (pervetus). Morever, it was necessary to be careful of your letter-carrier; if Cicero wished to send anything, he had to depend on Cæsar's special messengers, who were managed by his friend Oppius; more private correspondence went by confidential freedmen, like Hippodamus, because it might cause trouble if it fell into wrong hands.

Cicero's close correspondence with his brother and his friend is no doubt typical of that maintained by many Romans with relatives and connexions at the front. There is no reason to suppose that in 54 B.C. intercourse with Gaul was unusually well maintained; it may rather be assumed that the amount of interest shown in that year is typical of the general feeling of Rome during this eventful period. In the absence of further letters from Gaul, we are driven, in estimating the state of

Q. F., III, 1, 25, T. 148. In all quotations from Cicero's letters, I have added the number in Tyrrell's edition (1879-1890) as the most convenient for reference.

† Q. F., III, 3, 1, T. 151. This letter is not dated, but it was written two days before the first trial of Gabinius (ibid., § 3), which took place on Oct. 24. Cicero reckons his 'more than 50 days' from the date of Cæsar's writing, not from the date of his receiving the letter, which was Sept. 28. Impatience made him very unreasonable.