THE HOME ESTABLISHMENT OF THE "NA

TIONAL REPORTER SYSTEM."

The lawyer who enters St. Paul by the railroads from the southwest or south cannot avoid noticing a tall brick building, by the foot of which he passes, just above the old Wabasha street bridge; and the words "National Reporter System," which stretch across the building between the seventh and eighth stories, almost invariably make the legal visitor turn his head for a second look at the well-known sign which has become so familiar through the ubiquitous advertisement. Yet he has seen only the back view of an eight-story building, so built against the side of a hill that from the front the entrance on the level of Third street is upon the sixth story.

This is the home of the largest law publishing concern in the world. The whole building is a hive of industry, with its 300 or more employees, busied in all the manifold departments of law book making. Statistics give the poorest sort of an idea of facts, and it does not mean much to the visitor when he is told that 5,000 to 6,000 sheep resign their skins every month in favor of the National Reporter System, and that 12 men are constantly occupied as "forwarders." But it is more impressive to learn that the waste clippings make a car load for the paper mill every five or six weeks.

Upon entering the building, the professional eye will probably be first caught by the bulky envelopes, bearing the seals of different courts, which the mail carrier is leaving in the office. They come from all the states, and bring copies of the decisions which have been handed down by the courts in recent cases. The manuscripts are sent at once to the editorial department on the seventh floor. Here they go first through the hands of a corps of assistants, who attend to the bookkeeping details which are necessary to "keep in line" some 15,000 cases a year, and keep track of each opinion in all its stages of progress towards the printed report. There are three large rooms, occupying the entire back of the building, given up to the corps of "verifiers," copy preparers, and record keepers. At the front of the building, on the same floor, are the private offices of the editors. These are little rooms, separated by low partitions, and supplied with table, chairs, and bookshelves; and here the legal luminaries who make syllabus and index, statement and digest and annotation, are earnestly engaged in their work.

Up another flight of stairs is the composing room. Bookwork is a different thing from newspaper work, and legal bookwork is of the higher grades of that. As a result the compositors must be an exceptionally intelligent set of men. The capacity of this department is almost fabulous. The Annual Digest contains usually 14,000,000 ems, or about 28,000,000 separate letters, matter which will fill about 25 volumes, if set like the ordinary State Reports or text-books. It would take one average compositor nearly seven years to set it, but it was handled here in less than three weeks, without interruption to other current work. A printing establishment of this size must necessarily employ a number of typesetting machines, and accordingly it is not surprising to learn that eleven Thorne machines, and several Linotypes are constantly working on the Reporters.

After the stereotyped plates leave the composing and stereotype floor, they are sent down to the press room,-six stories below. Presses in a long row are here backed against the stone wall, working steadily away. The floor is laid upon the solid rock foundation, which was run out, ledge-like, for this purpose, when the building was constructed. The result is that these great machines, each weighing several tons, work without a jar. If the press rooms show the triumph of mechanical genius in a mechanical age, the mysterious vaults which open off from them might easily fit into some romance of the Middle Ages. Probably the underground vaults of the Middle Ages were not lit with electric lights, as these are, and they were generally used for less innocent purposes than the storing away of stereotyped plates recording the decrees of justice. The peculiar advantages of building a house upon a rock and on the side of a hill are again brought out by these vaults.

But it is impossible to present within these pages a complete description of the interesting establishment of the West Publishing Company. The history and prosperity of their "System" is significant as illustrating the present trend of law publishing. The enterprise now established on the banks of the Mississippi is indeed the practical enunciation of the statement of Chancellor Kent, who many years ago wrote: "The modern reports, and the latest of the modern, are the most useful, because they contain the last, and, it is to be presumed, the most correct exposition of the law."

BOOK NOTICES.

Hand-Book of Criminal Law. By Wm. L. Clark, Jr., St. Paul, Minn. West Publishing Co., 1894.

"Our elementary treatises, numbering many hundreds of volumes, are written not for the purpose of the teacher, or primarily for the purpose of the instruction of students, but for the use of the practising lawyer. They are, therefore, not especially adapted to the use of the student or the teacher of law. It is a work which belongs to the future, but it is a work which I think must sooner or later be done,-to cast our law into a more orderly, methodical and scientific form; and when this shall be accomplished the work of the teacher and the student will be made much easier and more satisfactory than it now is. The great drawback to-day, alike of the teacher and the student, is the non-existence of elementary works written by lawyers of competent learning and experience, designed for the specific purpose of enabling the teacher to teach and the student to learn, the great primordial and essential principles of our jurisprudence."

These words are quoted from Judge Dillon's fascinating volume "The Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America," (p. 87). It is grateful relief to a law teacher to find his own sentiments so satisfactorily expressed. Similar criticism might be made upon many law treatises from the practising lawyer's point of view; for while the law teachers are complaining that the text-books in law are written only for the lawyers, the lawyers are complaining that many of the text-books they have been induced to buy are fit only for law students.

The complaints from both quarters indicate that the law book writers, in trying to meet the wants of two such diverse classes of readers, have satisfied neither. Many of the law writers digest the same point differently on different pages, skim lightly over difficult problems, ignoring their existence instead of by vigorous wrestling with the difficulty suggesting to the hurried lawyer the strongest arguments on each side of the controversy; and on easy points are unduly laborious in threshing over again for the law student the straw of worn out controversies which distort his perspective of fundamental principles. The result has been that during the last twenty-five years the law text-book has fallen into disrepute with both practising lawyers and law teachers. Many lawyers insist that they have quit buying text-books; while some