The Reform and Registration Acts, 1832 - 1867. Edited by James Bigg.
(Waterlow.)—Mr. Bigg's work will be useful as containing the several Acts which relate to Parliamentary voting. We cannot say that we think much of it as a sample of an expurgated digest of the statute law. A collection of Acts on any subject almost always preserves the defects of the Acts themselves, if it does not aggravate those defects by being still more deficient in arrangement than the separate efforts of our draughtsmen and legislators. If a digest is to do nothing more than collect in one volume all the verbose clauses of all the Acta that bear on any one subject—and this seems to be Mr. Bigg's plan—we could easily do without it. If the style of the future digest is to be that of Mr. Bigg's introduction, we could spare it even more readily. How do twenty-five statutes comprise a digest? We thought the object of a digest was to comprise statutes.
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