412
The Green Bag
ened, and more than half of the material
is entirely new, the length having been increased words.
from
779,000 to 2,035,000
The appearance of the new Dillon on Municipal Corporations is thus an event of signal and profound importance.
The work at once claims a position for itself among the half-dozen leading text-books dealing with American law ever written, if, indeed, not as the
most
important
country
since
produced Kent's
in
this
Commentaries
and Story on the Constitution. It would be hard to find a more strik ing monument to the industry of a single man, or to the protracted labor of a life now nearing its eightieth milestone. It was in the well-supplied law library
law of municipal corporations, and this research, in which he had the services of neither stenographer nor assistant, occupied all his available time for about
six years.
Besides consulting hundreds
of volumes of reports, he investigated every English publication relating to the subject. There was little to guide the author in the arrangement of his materials, and his task was thus the more difficult. Filled with the desire to give his treatise the greatest possible practical utility, and realizing that the greater portion of those who would use his work would not have ready access
to large law libraries, he voluntarily shouldered the labor of setting out in
extended footnotes the general facts underlying the adjudications. In the
of James Grant of Davenport, Iowa,
course of time, in 1872, the work appeared
that Judge Dillon fitted himself for
and at once met with a favorable re ception from bench and bar. The trea
the bar, and he has said that it was in this library that the desire to write a
treatise on municipal corporations must have been first aroused. While an occupant of
the Supreme
bench
of
Iowa, he became possessed with the wish to write a legal work which might serve the needs of judges and practi tioners alike, and he could not have
made a happier selection of a subject, for the law of municipal corporations was then in a state of much uncertainty,
and no other branch either of public or of private law touches more closely the lives of American citizens. In the Grant law library he found complete
sets of the state reports, and the inter vals between terms of court were devoted to a laborious and systematic explora
tise soon came to be frequently cited by the courts as a standard authority.
Succeeding editions saw it enlarged and brought up to date, and in the present
edition
all
fourth of
the
decisions since
the
1890 have been examined,
resulting in the citation of many thou sand new cases and a great amplification of the text in which their doctrines are expounded.
The accuracy of Judge Dillon's methods and his gift for exposition are well known through the former editions. The most striking characteristic of his work is the wonderful thoroughness with which it has been done. This great law book has been erected on a
Maine, he set out to examine all the
firm foundation of painstaking attention to the smallest details and finest rami fications of an intricate subject. Not the method of easy generalization, but that of patient and tireless dissection, has been followed. The result is a structure exceptionally firm in its ma
cases in the reports dealing with the
sonry, analytical rather than specula
tion of the trackless wilderness of case law of whose formidable proportions
Judge Dillon has
written
elsewhere
with a vividness born of personal ex
perience.
Beginning with the state of
