LORD LOREBURN of Commons as the only gateway leading to Utopia; for our law has now reached a con dition of complexity where reforms of sub stance can no longer be looked for from the expansion of the common law or the mould ing discretion of equity judges, but must come, if they come at all, from the legisla ture. How impotent, for example, are the doctrines of the common law or even equity, to protect children, to ameliorate the lot of the worker, to grapple with intemperance, to reclaim the criminal or satisfy the just demands of labor, and these were the sort of reforms — social and humanitarian — with which Sir Robert Reid has been specially in sympathy all his life, and to aid which he early in his professional career sought the suffrages of the electors of Here ford to send him to Parliament. In the wooing of constituencies, fraught with ill luck to many eminent lawyers like Lord Darcy and Lord Halsbury, his — Sir Robert Reid's — course has been remarkably smooth. From the day, in 1880, when he became member for Hereford till he received the Great Seal, at the end of 1905, he has kept his seat in the House of Commons, with only one brief interval between, the autumn of 1885 and the summer of 1886. At the general election in 1886 he was returned for Dumfries Burghs, and ever since then, for twenty years, the "Queen of the South, Maggie by the banks of Nith" as Burns calls Dumfries, has remained faithful to him. No wonder that on attaining the woolsack and choosing his territorial title as a peer, the new Chancellor should have made a graceful acknowledgment of all he owed the city by identifying himself with its traditions as Lord Loreburn of Dumfries. The uninstructed marvelled at the name. The Lord Chancellor said: "One has broken the record in the matter of titles so far as the locale of any title is concerned. Peerage titles have been taken from the merest hamlets or deserted castles, but no one has ventured to adopt the name of a street until Sir Robert Reid became Lord Loreburn of
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Dumfries, Loreburn being a leading thor oughfare in the town." Alas! for the critic? He had missed the most significant point in connection with the word. It is quite true that Loreburn is the name of a street in Dumfries, but independently of the street, it is the most distinctive word connected with the town "A Loreburn! " being the old war cry of the citizens in many a border fight. The office which Lord Loreburn now fills is one of venerable traditions — a "heap of anomalies" Mr. Bagehot calls it in his English Constitution. It is an office which, being an ancient one, can only be granted, Lord Coke tells us, "as it hath been accus tomed." This was in the days of Henry II, by the King ' ' appendendo magnum Anglice Sigillum at Collum Cancellarii electi." In modern times it has been by the King simply delivering the Great Seal to the person to hold it, verbally addressing him by the title which he is to bear, followed, in either case, by the taking of the oath which is itself a curious relic. It runs thus : The Chancellor is to swear: 1. That well and truly he shall serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, and his people in the office of Chancellor: 2. That he shall doe right to all manner of people, poore and rich, after the lawes and usages of the Realm: 3. That he shall truly counsel the King and his Counsell he shall layne (old French word signifying hide) and keep: 4. That he shall not know nor suffer the hurt or disinheriting of the King, or that the rights of the Crown be decreased by any means as far as he may let it. 5 . And if he may not let it, he shall make it clearly and expressly to be known to the King with his true advice and counsel : 6. And that he shall do and purchase the King's profit in all that he reasonably may, as God him help, and by the contents of this Book (the Bible). Here, in the form of oath, we have illus trated the complex nature of the office. The Lord High Chancellor of England is not
