The American Historical Review/Volume 23/Reviews of Books/Lord Stowell

by Charles Merrill Hough

 

Lord Stowell: his Life and the Development of English Prize Law. By E. S. Roscoe, Registrar of the Prize Court of Great Britain and Ireland. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1916. Pp. 116. $1.50.)

Stowell's biographies are out of print, men remember him as Eldon's brother, prize law is of but sporadic importance, and admiralty is a neglected mystery to lawyers and laymen who dwell away from deep water.

To the Registrar of the Admiralty, custodian of the court's traditions, and versed in its peculiar learning, such ignorance of the greatest name in its annals is distasteful, and now that the carriage of goods by sea is as dangerous as in the day of Stowell (and Napoleon), Mr. Roscoe has written an "impression" of William Scott "as a man", and a proof that his ""ndividual, important and permanent" labors answer modern requirements.

It is high distinction that any man's intellectual work endures for a century, yet in our day of steam, electricity, and international credits, Stowell's law, formulated for sailing ships that disappeared from knowledge on every voyage, has proven wholly applicable. His successors have done little more than indicate the legal identity of phenomena a century apart and differing in every external. Thus bottomry and respondentia have disappeared, but Stowell's treatment of these liens upon captures has disposed of claims based on hypothecated bills of lading securing bankers' drafts.

Such logical victories appeal especially to the bar, and the book is primarily for lawyers. But no other volume has clearly shown the reasons for Stowell's unique influence in prize. He was no mere practitioner, office bred and sharpened by immature advocacy; but a ripe scholar, a teacher of history, a sound common lawyer, a thorough civilian, an astute politician, and something of a courtier. Many judges had presided over the English Admiralty, but he was the first to set forth the grounds of judgment in ordered sequence, and to make his "sentences" a body of "case law"—the method of legal formulation still most acceptable; he was perhaps the first able to do this, as he certainly was the first with business enough to give scope to ability.

The author admits that the corpus juris reasoned out by Stowell inclined against the neutral and favored belligerents. Bitterly did contemporary America complain of this; but there is scarcely an antineutral decision that has not been drastically applied in our courts. The book might have illustrated this more fully, for it is high tribute to the Englishman's mental power that when Americans warred they adopted the rules once so cordially abused.

A judge writes to be quoted, and Stowell's quotability might have received ampler treatment. Phrases such as the "cobweb title" that does not divest jurisdiction in possession, and the resounding sentence that a mariner's wage lien is "sacred as long as a plank" remains of his vessel, have kept Stowell in the mouths of counsel.

Mr. Roscoe easily shows the judge's importance and modernity; "as a man", there was temptation to special pleading. Yet the book fairly pictures the worldly man, "pleasant" to Sir Walter Scott, Dr. Johnson's companion and executor—but no man's hearty friend. An intelligent selfishness, not unmixed with parsimony, forbade any commitment not easily broken without open reproach.

The volume pretends to nothing new, except to fit Stowell into our century; that point is fully proved; for the rest it is an attractive summary of the enduring work of a well-bred, selfish, highly educated, and slightly miserly gentleman.

Charles M. Hough.