REVIEWS
| Date | 01 March 1938 |
| Published date | 01 March 1938 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1937.tb00032.x |
324
MODERN LAW REVIEW March,
1938
REVIEWS
LAW
AND
OTHER
THINGS.
By
THE
RT.
HON.
LORD MACMILLAN,
G.C.V.O.,
LL.D. Cambridge
:
at
the University Press, 1937.
284
pp.
8s.
6d.
net.
After Lord Macmillan had spoken
at
a
recent international congress
one of the foreign delegates remarked to the present reviewer, “On voit
tout de suite que c’est une grande personnalitb.”
It
is
a
judgment from
which there can be
no
dissent. We all know of Lord Macmillan’s dis-
tinguished career
in
law and in public life, of his great intellectual gifts,
his
immense capacity for work, and the unsparing way in which he has
given his talents to the service of the State and to the promotion of bodies
and causes which work for the public good. But others might do as much
without achieving the same commanding influence or winning the peculiar
esteem and affection with which Lord Macmillan is regarded by all who
have met him or heard him speak. The secret lies in the personality which
reveals itself in the pages of the volume before
us.
The distinguished author has here collected addresses on such subjects
as
“Law and Politics,” “Law and Ethics,” “Law and Religion,”
“Law
and History,” “Law and Language,” which he has delivered to audiences
of lawyers and others. With one exception-a paper on “The Ethics of
Advocacy,” which was read before the Royal Philosophical Society of
Glasgow in 1916-they date from the last ten years. There are also
included three papers
on
the judicial and literary work of Lord Chancellor
Birkenhead, two of which were originally published
as
reviews in
The
Empire Review.
the third being the brief but eloquent valediction which
appeared
as
a
preface to Lord Birkenhead’s
Last
Essays.
The addresses would repay study as models of the speaker’s art.
Lord Macmillan does not preach, he talks. He talks with
a
felicity of word
and phrase
so
perfect
as
to seem unstudied
;
he talks with such appearance
of spontaneous and discursive ease that one only gradually realises that
beneath the smooth surface there
is
moving
a
strong and persuasive
current of thought.
Ille regit dictzs animos,
et
pectora mulcst.
Or we may
say with the older poet,
Suadaeque medulla.
What he says and the
manner in which he says
it
are always perfectly suited to the occasion.
To Scottish law agents celebrating the jubilee of
a
professional association
he speaks as
a
fellow-practitioner in reminiscent and reflective mood, to
students as
a
wise and kindly elder, to members of historical and philo-
sophical societies
as
one who from his technical experience can bring some
contribution to the discussion of problems which concern lawyer and non-
lawyer alike. When he turns to address
a
nation-wide audience (in his
broadcast National Lecture on “Law and the Citizen”) he assumes,
though not
so
completely
as
altogether to disguise the man, the robe of
the judge and statesman, and his natural
urbanitas
and
comitas
are rein-
forced by the deeper notes of
gravitas
and
auctoritas.
If
this versatility were merely the product of conscious rhetorical
artifice we might admire
it,
but
it
would leave us cold. But, just as the
numerous apt quotations which illustrate his argument-he
is
as
much
at
home in his classics from Heraclitus to Petronius
as
he is in English
literature, and his legal reading extends from early anonymous Scottish
treatises to the productions of contemporary academic jurisprudence
which the busy professional lawyer
so
seldom has time to read-are no
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