With this qualification, therefore, I venture to say that the view point of a lawyer practising in Quebec about the Code cannot but be continually changing as he becomes, from year to year, more familiar with all the complex problems of the every day life of his fellow citizens, through which the strands of rights and obligations are so closely interwoven that he can almost feel the woof of the Civil Law as it sustains the whole fabric.

Being constantly in contact with a whole web of legal ties which he and all about him recognize, of which he and they feel the binding force and without which the fabric would rent and tear in innumerable places, and still meeting only here and there with a combination the exact counterpart of the articles of the Code, he begins to realize that those articles are only the key or cipher by which he may learn the laws which he sees in operation all about him, just as the alphabet and the combinations of alphabets which he grappled with in the nursery proved to be the keys and ciphers which opened up to him the mysteries of human thought committed to paper.

He then begins to realize that the Code is not a book of rules to be followed or broken with attendant good or evil consequences at the hands of the King's justices, but rather the historical synopsis of what has been, in the past, well ordered human behaviour and, as such, is indicative of those undying principles to which well ordered future human behaviour should conform or should be made to conform.

He begins to realize that codified law is not dead law destined to set up a standard which shall know no progress and be considered as ordering a state of living susceptible of no improvement, but rather, in its concrete statements, an exposition of solutions that have been tried and found beneficial and which flow from underlying principles susceptible of supplying, almost inexhaustibly, such future solutions as the increasing complexity of human transactions may require.

He finds that the lawyers and notaries, in drawing up contracts and wills and settlements, the parties in indicating to them the manner in which they want their present or future dealings or relations with each other or those of their successors to be governed, the Courts in passing upon these contracts and wills and stipulations, rejecting some as bad, accepting and enenforcing some as good, are constantly adding to the body of solutions tried and found beneficial and conformable to well ordered human conduct, and, therefore, constantly adding new beacons and buoys to the original chart.

Of course, he recognizes that certain conceptions are inexorably established: The natural liberty and essential equality of all men. The indissolubility of the family ties, and their natural bearing on the status of the individual. The untrammelled freedom of creating contractual relations and so making

laws binding on one's self and on all others who have consented thereto. The fulness of dominion over the things one owns even to binding them after one's death. The complete liability to repair all injuries wrongfully caused to another in his person or in his things. Such are some of the cardinal principles which he and his Code have regarded as necessary postulates.

But even now he is wondering if these postulates will not require some qualification in the solutions they predicate.

Human laws must be applicable to the facts of human lives. And in human lives family ties are being dissolved. Though we still think it should not be so, will we not have to determine problems that arise from its being so in fact?

Though we still think a husband should exercise some control over the legal capacity of his junior partner in wedded life, if she is his junior partner no longer in civic life and is equally entitled with him to control the destinies of the whole country by her vote, shall she continue to have only an unequal control or no control at all over the destinies of the family patrimony?

And as to freedom of contracts and fulness of proprietary rights have they not already been very materially abridged by what we have come to know as paternal control by the state? How far need this go to assure the best welfare of the greatest number is a question for the economist and the statesman, but how far has it gone and how far is it going, are questions which affect the lawyer's view point of a Code predicated on the contrary postulates.

In recent months Quebec and the temper and behaviour and conservatism of her population have come in for a large measure of very favourable comment, comment which contrasts most sharply with that which was current only a few months previous. Nevertheless, the good which is now being so prominently spoken of and recognized was there all the time, and, if our conservatism and social sanity is now worthy of any of this praise, it is only because we had and have a social order worthy of being conserved, and a mode of living and of dealing with the problems of human life which can be improved but which should be made to answer the requirements even of the present troublesome times without any serious or very radical departure from the concepts which underlie our Civil Code. (Applause).

Coming then to Sir James' second query: How can the Code be made useful throughout Canada in development of commercial law?

Of course commercial and business pursuits are only a part or an aspect of the activities in which socialized human beings engage, and though they may require some special rules and regulations for their more convenient and speedy prosecution, these rules must reflect and connotate the same general principles

as constitute the accepted standard of proper human behaviour in the community to which they are applied.

If the question were how COULD the Code be made useful throughout Canada in development of such rules and regulations, from the view point of the lawyer practising in Quebec, the obvious answer would be by adopting it and applying it throughout Canada. (Laughter).

But the question is how CAN it be so made useful, and it implies, I take it, not only a theoretical but rather a practical possibility, and the view point of the lawyer practising in Quebec is not so restricted as to prevent him from sensing the almost insuperable difficulties of bringing the whole of the people throughout Canada to realize, not only that some good can come out of Quebec, but that its general system of laws could, by any stretch of imagination, be considered preferable to the untrammelled "course of justice flowing in large streams from the King, as the fountain, to his superior courts of record; and being then subdivided into smaller channels, till the whole and every part of the kingdom are plentifully watered and refreshed." No that is not a practical possibility, and I do not wonder at it nor do I quote Blackstone and his beautiful imagery with any other feeling than one of profound admiration, both for his immense contribution to the more even flow of that stream of common law justice, and for the Anglo-Saxon's steadfast attachment to the customs and processes of the great nation from which he is descended. (Applause.)

But there is a practical possibility of making the Code useful outside of Quebec without departing from the customs and processes dear to Anglo-Saxon jurists of every age.

Did not Blackstone himself in England, and afterwards Kent in America, frequently point out in their lectures and writings, side by side with the rule of the common law, that which obtained among the civilians, and did they not thereby tend to make clearer their exposition of the former and secure a better comprehension of the principle underlying it and a surer guide in how it should be applied?

Could not those who, to-day, profess and teach the common law in the English speaking provinces of Canada find it to the advantage both of the practitioner and of the student to compare the solutions of our Code to those of the leading cases and of the recognized text books?

A rule that has been tried and not found wanting when Rome was developing, in its republican centuries, the sway of reason over the dealings of men, which still commanded and was still obeyed when all else was bending to the omnipotent authority of the imperial Caesars, which lived through the upheaval of that great Empire's disruption, which still served as a sure guide to just solutions when kingly courts again displaced

ordeals and combats in settling the disputes of contending litigants, which did not perish when a mighty but overwrought people arose in its fury and cast off all that was looked upon as oppressive and fettering, which on the contrary found its way into the first modern codification of municipal laws for free citizens, such a rule may not be expressed in words that find their exact counterpart in any of the precedents of the year books, but it cannot be a rule which violates any recognized canon of elemental justice. And every time the lawyer's mind, grappling with a given set of facts, succeeds in working out the true relations which they should in justice bear to each other, both his mind and the administration of the law are benefitted thereby, no matter what the Courts may, for a time, decide.

If then one bears in mind that the civil system of the Code, besides its intrinsic worth as a mirror of good human behaviour, presents to the Canadian lawyer the additional feature of being the law which obtains in the oldest and one of the largest of the provinces of his country, and has put, on the people of that province, an impress which they esteem it their proud duty to preserve, has he not, in his quest for rules of business and commercial transactions that shall overreach provincial boundaries and provide solutions acceptable from one end of the country to the other, an interest stimulated both by the desire to choose that which is best and by the desire to choose that which is practicable, to familiarize himself with the principles and processes of that Code.

It would be the height of presumption for me to attempt to underscore any of the rules of the civil law as more specially worthy of consideration in this regard, and it is simply by way of illustration I venture to point out that in the conflict between the doctrine of the vendor's implied warranties and the maxim caveat emptor, the rules of the Code have been fitted to numerous applications not inconsistent with the good faith required between man and man nor yet too restrictive of commercial enterprise; that the debtor's control over the assets which are his own, but which his debts have bound to his creditors as the tangible substance of their claims against him, has called for solutions which have stood the test both of civil convenience and of good conscience; that the civil law doctrine of a master's liability for the faults of his servants, even though he have several and it be one of them who has suffered, has not prevented industrial development along the shores of the St. Lawrence and did perhaps blaze the way to some of the beneficial provisions of our various Workmen's Compensation Acts. Would not such chapters of the Code afford to the common law jurist dealing with like problems even though it be under a different system, matter for interesting and useful comparative study?

And may one not go further? The view point of the Canadian lawyer wherever practising his profession cannot but embrace the wider problems which confront us all as citizens of a state, young but fast developing, whose footsteps are already set in the paths which only nations may safely tread. If we hope to ever see a broad national spirit weld our people more closely together, should we not be mindful that such a spirit must involve the pride of the individual in the well ordered state of social conditions throughout the whole of Canada, as well as in the natural beauties and incomparable resources of its far flung provinces.?

A national spirit cannot attach to the soil alone; it must comprise the men who dwell upon it, the institutions which make them a body politic and also the private laws which crystallize their attitude towards each other and their methods of realizing human progress.

These men are not, nor need they be exact copies one of another; their social institutions do and they well may reflect the special characteristics of the various groups; so may their private laws and their local rules of individual behaviour, but if there is not a wide spread feeling that in spite of such differences, perhaps even at times because of such differences, all these things are good to conserve, are worthy of mutual respect, constitute something for the whole nation and for each individual to take pride in and which enriches the national heritage, how can we have a national spirit?

We are all of one country and though had it been given to us to choose, some might have preferred less heterogenous groupings, those groupings do constitute the mass of the Canadian people and the only material out of which a Canadian nation can grow.

May we not then by meeting one another on common Canadian ground, by learning to know one another better and by recognizing in each other preordained partners in a necessary society, hope to discover in each other and in the two great systems of jurisprudence that have been handed down to us by the experience of centuries, some of the good that is in us and in them both, and find that good sufficient to outweigh the misgivings we are too prone to feel for that which is not of ourselves and our own surroundings.

Than that object and that aim none can be worthier of the best efforts of every Canadian lawyer as a true Canadian citizen, and I know that all who are here to-day, and I venture to hope that many who have not come, soon will recognize the yearly meetings of the Canadian Bar Association as most fitting occasions to promote that "greater unity of spirit among all Canadian people by better understanding among lawyers.' (Applause.)