When, during a recent visit at Harvard University, I called upon my friend Mrs. James Barr Ames, in her Cambridge home, she most generously gave me the originals of some letters which had been written to her husband by Mait-land, Brunner, and other legal scholars. On examining the letters, I found that the bundle contained six letters written to Ames by Maitland, and also the original of one long letter which Ames had written to Maitland, a letter which for some reason, possibly the refreshing of memory, appears to have been returned to the writer.

The foundation of the Société de Législation Comparée, whose jubilee we are now celebrating, preceded by a few years, as it happened, the opening of a new epoch in' the history of English law.

In his Introduction to the Handbook of Palestine, which appeared last year, the High Commissioner, the Eight Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel, wrote: “If I were called upon to express in a single word the distinguishing characteristic of Palestine, I should say ‘diversity.’” What is true of the physical characteristics, the climate, the religions, the peoples, and the civilizations of that little country is equally true of its laws and its judicial systems.

The subject upon which I have the honour to address you is so wide that within thetime at my disposal I can only hope to touch upon elementals. My task will be less onerous if I limit myself to the system of public control of industrial relations in South Australia. Each State of the Commonwealth has its own system. There is also a Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration for the purpose of the settlement of industrial disputes which extend beyond the limits of a single State. This dual system of control by Courts of co-ordinate control has led to much conflict in the past. I can only say, speaking of time present, that practical necessities tend towards a co-ordination of the principles which underlie the decisions of Commonwealth and State Courts.

‘Reprisals’ is a mediaeval term which is first met with in the thirteenth century. Lawyers, who wrote in Latin, knew it as repraesaliae or repressaliae an almost exact rendering of the French représailles and the Italian ripresaglie. They tried hard to identify the usages it represented with practices they knew in the civil law. Especially did they try to identify it with the Roman pigneratio. It was not till the early eighteenth century that the essential uniqueness of reprisals was categorically asserted by Bynkershoek in such forceful terms as “operam ludunt qui rem apud Romanos incognitam Latino vocabulo conantur exprimere.”