We may doubt,
therefore, the propriety of quoting in our courts English authorities
subsequent to that adoption; still more, the admission of authorities
posterior to the Declaration of Independence, or rather to the accession
of that King, whose reign, _ab initio_, was that very tissue of wrongs
which rendered the Declaration at length necessary. The reason for it
had inception at least as far back as the commencement of his reign.
This relation to the beginning of his reign, would add the advantage of
getting us rid of all Mansfield's innovations, or civilizations of the
common law. For however I admit the superiority of the civil, over the
common law code, as a system of perfect justice, yet an incorporation of
the two would be like Nebuchadnezzar's image of metals and clay, a thing
without cohesion of parts. The only natural improvement of the common
law, is through its homogeneous ally, the chancery, in which new
principles are to be examined, concocted, and digested. But when,
by repeated decisions and modifications, they are rendered pure and
certain, they should be transferred by statute to the courts of common
law, and placed within the pale of juries. The exclusion from the courts
of the malign influence of all authorities after the _Georgium sidus_
became ascendant, would uncanonize Blackstone, whose book, although the
most elegant and best digested of our law catalogue, has been perverted
more than all others to the degeneracy of legal science.
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