Conservatism in Legal Procedure have been made, and it may make such further or other order as the case may require. In brief, an appeal is a re hearing without intricacy of method, is freed from all our formal labor and a great deal of our expense and is dis posed of in a substantial way and upon substantial grounds. Mr. Odgers, speaking at the beginning of this century of reforms in the law accomplished in England during the last century, says:— The changes which I have sketched are not final or unalterable. We have not at tained perfection yet, other modifications may be deemed expedient hereafter. But the reforms to which I have referred tonight have all been made with the object and have all had the effect of simplifying the procedure and improving the administration of our law. They have benefited our increasing popula tion; they have removed obstacles from the path of commerce, and promoted the general prosperity of the realm. Justice is, in fact, done in our law courts. No honest litigant of ordinary sagacity can now be defeated in an action by any mere technicality, or lose his case through any mistaken step or accidental slip. Litigation in 1800 was dilatory and costly; now it is cheap and expeditious. To borrow the language of Lord Brougham, the proce dure of our courts was in 1800 "a two-edged sword in the hands of craft and oppression; it is now the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence." We, too, have made changes in our legal procedure since the year 1800, and the object and the effect have been to simplify it and to greatly improve the administration of our law. But we have not yet made such progress as to justify us in saying that "no honest litigant of ordinary sagacity can now be defeated in an action by any mere technicality, or lose his case through any mistaken step or accidental slip." Our criminal procedure is in a worse state than the civil. We read Hale's Pleas of the Crown and wonder at the
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refinements of legal reasoning in times otherwise not overmuch refined. A bill of indictment was a marvel of legal craft. It was specific to a degree sug gesting great delight on the part of the draftsman in the horrible details of the crime he was describing. If it was murder, he described the defendant and his victim, the time and place, the manner of committing the offense, with what sort of, weapon, the value of the weapon, in which hand it was held, the number of wounds inflicted, upon what portion of the body, how long, how wide and how deep, and much more of the same sort. As the more detailed his description the greater the liability to mistake, to avoid the objection of variance he multiplied his counts, the differences in them being as to the kind of weapon used, or as to the hand in which it was held or the portion of the body upon which the wound was in flicted, and so on, until the indictment was expanded into thirty or forty counts, and all in Latin, which the defendant did not understand, and almost as offen sive as the crime it described. Sometimes the pleader, not knowing an appropriate Latin word, would use an English one, and if there was a recognized Latin equivalent for the Eng lish word used, the indictment was bad. "Regularly," says Hale, "false Latin doth not vitiate an indictment, if yet the indictment be reasonably intelli gible." But some words were so essen tial in their precise form that the omis sion or misplacing of letters in them rendered the indictment fatally defec tive. " Feloniter" would not serve for "jelonice," "burgariter" for ' 'burglariter Hale gives us the reason in case of the word used to charge the crime of mur der: "This word, 'murdravit' is a word of art, and cannot be otherwise exprest; therefore 'murderavit,' instead of 'mur
