and this is what he did. He assembled fifty or sixty of the wisest lawyers to be found in England. Happily, there were great men in the Law; men who valued the laws of England as much as anybody ever did; and who knew withall that there was something more sacred than any of these. Oliver said to them, 'go and examine this thing and in the name of God inform me what is necessary to be done with it. You will see how we may clean out the foul things in that Chancery Court, which render it poison to everybody.' Well, they sat down accordingly, and in the course of six weeks (there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches, and no babble of any kind, there was just the business in hand), they got some sixty propositions fixed in their minds as the summary of the things required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions, Chancery was reconstituted and remodeled; and so it got a new lease of life, and has lasted to our time. It had become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer. That is an instance of the manner of things that were done when a Dictatorship prevailed in the country, and that was how the Dictator did them. I reckon all England, Parliamentary England, got a new lease of life from that Dictatorship of Oliver's; and, on the whole, that the good fruits of it will never die while England exists as a nation."

The English speaking race has had two Judges that may fairly be considered constructive Judges. These are Marshall and Mansfield. It is hard to say to which of these two the palm should be awarded. But this certainly can be said: In one department of the law, Constitutional law, Marshall was easily supreme. But Mansfield took a much wider view of the Law than Marshall did. His eye ranged over the whole field of jurisprudence. Whether he was striking the shackels from a negro slave brought by his English owner from the West Indies to England upon the ground that the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe, whether he was making the Military Governor of a far distant island answer in England for his arbitrary treatment of one of the King's subjects in his military domains, or whether he was settling some ordinary question relating to the status of a pauper in Kent, he

was supreme-dealing with questions of the first magnitude and questions of the most trifling importance with facile impartiality, and settling rules in every department of the law that have become canons in human life.

Lord Mansfield was an ambitious man, but his ambition was a noble one. It was an ambition to be well thought of for great and virtuous deeds and to be remembered by future ages as a benefactor to mankind.

In a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Chatham taunted him with seeking popularity. Turning on him and eyeing him with calm resolution he thus addressed him:

"It has been imputed to me by the noble Earl on my left hand that I, too, am running the race of popularity. If the noble Earl means by popularity the applause bestowed by afterages on good and virtuous actions, I have long been struggling in that race, to what purpose all-trying time can alone determine; but if he means that mush-room popularity which is raised without merit, and lost without crime, he is much mistaken. I defy the noble Earl to point out a single act in my life where the popularity of the times ever had the smallest influence upon my determination. I thank God I have a more permanent and steady rule for my conduct-the dictates of my own breast. Those who have foregone that pleasing adviser, and given up their minds to the slavery of every popular impulse, I sincerely pity; I pity them still more if vanity leads them to mistake the shouts of a mob for the triumph of Fame. Experience might inform them that many who have been saluted with the huzzas of a crowd one day, have received its execrations the next; and many who, by the fools of their own times, have been held up as spotless patriots, have, nevertheless, appeared on the historian's page, when truth has triumphed over delusion, the assassins of liberty. Why, then, can the noble Earl think I am ambitious of present popularity—the echo of flattery and counterfeit of renown?"

That was his ambition and time has justified his expectation that he would receive his reward.

His position and influence with his contemporaries is almost inconceivable. I have already quoted from Mr. Justice Buller's

exalted tribute to him from his place on the bench. When speaking of the new principles he had been the means of introducing into the law, he said:

"Most of us have heard these principles stated, reasoned upon, enlarged and explained, until we have been lost in admiration at the strength and stretch of the human understanding."

But the way he was thought of is best illustrated perhaps by the following incident. Erskine was the greatest advocate ever at the English bar and he rose to be Lord Chancellor of England. Giving an account of how Lord Mansfield treated one of his most celebrated arguments, Erskine said:

"He treated me, not with contempt indeed, for of that his nature was incapable, but he put me aside with indulgence as you do a child when it is lisping its prattle out of season."

What must have been the position and standing of a man who could treat such a man as Erskine in that way, and with the approbation of Erskine himself and of everybody else. I can not forbear to quote here the following passage from Lord Campbell's life of him. Speaking of the criticisms of ignorant lawyers on his introduction of equitable principles into the law, he says:

"But these delusions are no more; and Mansfield may now be compared to the unclouded majesty of Mont Blanc when the mists which for a time obscured his summit have passed

away.

to

"There are a few undeniable facts, which are quite conclusive prove that he enjoyed an unparalleled ascendancy, and that this ascendancy was well deserved. Although he presided above thirty years in the Court of King's Bench, there were in all that time only two cases in which his opinion was not unanimously adopted by his brethren who sat on the bench with him. Yet they were men of deep learning and entire independence of mind. He found there Sir Thomas Denison, Sir Michael Foster and Sir John Eardly Wilmot, who was afterwards Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and refused the great seal. They were succeeded by Sir Joseph Yates, Sir Richard Aston, who had been Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in Ireland, Sir James Hewitt, afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and a

peer by the title of Lord Lifford; Sir Edward Willes, Sir William Blackstone, Sir William Henry Ashurst, Sir Nash Grose, and Sir Edward Buller. Again, of the many thousand judgments which Lord Mansfield pronounced during the third part of a century, two only were reversed. The compliment to Chancellors that their decrees were affirmed amounts to very little, for the only appeal is to the House of Lords, where the same person presides, so that it may be considered ab eodem ad eundem. But a writ of error then lay from the King's Bench either to the Exchequer Chamber, constituted of the Judges of the Common Pleas and Exchequer, or to the House of Lords to be heard before the Lord Chancellor and all the Judges of England, without any predisposition to affirm. What will appear to my professional brethren a more striking fact still, strongly evincing the confidence reposed in his judicial candor and ability by such men as Dunning and Erskine, opposed to him in politics, who practiced before him,—in all his time there was never a bill of exceptions tendered to his direction; the counsel against whom he decided either acquiescing in his ruling, or being perfectly satisfied that the question would afterwards be fairly brought before the Court and satisfactorily determined on a motion for a new trial.”

The English people, as we all know, are not an effusive people. They are not given to attaching laudatory adjectives to men's names unless they belong there. Prior to Lord Mansfield's time, the single Englishman who, by universal consent, was called Great was King Alfred. They called him King Alfred the Great. But Lord Mansfield's powers and services had so impressed themselves upon English thought that on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is inscribed, "The Great Lord Mansfield." The compliment is unique, but the compliment is deserved.

Other civil magistrates have performed great services to their states, but to Lord Mansfield alone has it been given to change the very nature of a people. He took from the Civil law the fundamental doctrines of Christianity and forced them into the Common law in the place of traditions that had come down from barbarians; and, thus forcing into the Common law

the elementary teachings of Christ, he changed the whole nature and character of the forces operating upon the minds and spirits of the English speaking people and started them in new directions never contemplated before. Where the impetus he gave to the new thought he had created will end, no man can tell. But it is safe to say that if our civilization ever perishes, which God forbid, Lord Mansfield's handiwork will stand out like the Morning Star, till chaos has enveloped all.