London Legal Letter. lish-speaking people; and whose covered oak screens, black with age, are among the finest in Europe, and in which every lawyer for two or three hundred years, who has been called to the Bar by the Middle Temple must have " eaten his dinner." The chair was occupied by the Lord Chan cellor. The Lord Chief Justice, who had hurried up to London from Circuit for the purpose, had intended to support him, but owing to illness, was obliged to be absent. Nearly every judge of the High Court, in cluding those of the House of Lords and the Appellate as well as the Queen's Bench and Chancery Divisions, was present, while there was hardly an absentee from the ranks of working Queen's Counsel and Jurors. Such a gathering of English judges and lawyers upon any occasion, professional or social, has rarely if ever occurred. Certainly not within the memory of those now at the Bar. In ad dition to these hosts there were present as guests, but guests invited to assist in doing honor to the American visitors, representa tives from practically every part of the United Kingdom and many of the great de pendencies of the Crown. There were judges from the Court of Sessions of Scotland, dis tinguished judges from Ireland, judges from India, from Australia, from the Cape and from Canada, and even from the far East. The after-dinner speeches, after "Grace after meat" had been sung by the choir boys of the old Temple Church, were full of gen uine and spontaneous fraternity and a feeling not only of kinship but that so long as the common bond of a common law united the two communities there could never be dis sension and division between them. The key note struck by Mr. Choate in proposing the health of the Queen was preserved through out the evening. He was as usual graceful and eloquent, and it was a matter of regret that his official position as Ambassador pre cluded him from replying for the American Bar. The toasts included the President of the United States. "The Bench and Bar
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of America" was proposed by the Lord Chancellor and eloquently responded to for the Bench by Judge Baldwin of Connecticut. He said that what above all else bound the American people together was the one under lying system of jurisdiction which they in herited from their ancestors. This unity of the common law stretching across the Amer ican continent, from Maine to California, had permeated and inspired all American institutions, and had welded together all the States by ties that no written constitution could ever create. For more than two cen turies Westminster Hall was the Mecca of the American lawyer when he crossed the sea. Westminster Hall had lost its judicial character, but as the American visitor en tered the venerable hall of the Middle Tem ple he could still have something of the feeling of coming home. Their legal ances try was the same. Coke, Mansfield and Blackstone, and the whole great panoply of English lawyers in every century preceding the present were their legal ancestry. Their knowledge of the common law was inherited by them directly from men who went out from the Temple to the wilds and woods of Massachusetts Bay. The first governor of the first English colony in America which elected a governor — John Winthrop — was a barrister of the Inner Temple, and at his council board were others educated in the Temple. Wherever the English tongue had gone, the English law had gone also. It had followed because of its fitness for free men, because of its power of adaptation to new environments, because it was capable of growth as the world grew, because it was a system of principles rather than of rules. Daniel Webster once spoke of the morning drum-beat by which the English garrisons around the globe were ready in every land to salute the sun at his coming. It might be even England's higher pride that wherever her people went her law followed. They were all ministers and officers of this one system of common law. Some of their States
