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 always present in all the tribunals where justice purports to be administered. Here was the problem which it devolved upon the supreme judiciary of the land to consider: A statute without a single example, purporting to outlaw the domestic relations of a people and to reprobate all who had entered into them; professedly deriving its sanction from a constitutional clause with which it had no congruity, opening a field of legislation and correspondingly of judicial service hitherto unoccupied; and many thousands of loyal citizens whose nuptial bonds, personal liberties, domestic rights, legitimacy and title to inherit, depended upon the decision. It was a problem requiring for its proper solution an analysis of the most fundamental of all laws—of the principles of social order, the source and fountain from which the government derives its existence and authority. Upon the one hand was the social fact, which is and forever must remain the law; upon the other a statute having upon its face a falsehood and, in its substance a despotism. How will the court decide? How did it decide? Let it not be said that the magistrates of the judicature of last resort in this great republic, are swayed from their equilibriums by the fantastical clamors of silly women; or that they permit their reasons to be overcome by communistic harangues, delivered by well-dressed visionaries in lecture halls, or spouted by vulgar ruffians from the steps of public edifices; or that they accept the platform of some party as an authority superior to law or reason. But where, unless from one or another of these sources, they obtained the instructions upon which their four lines of dictum were predicated, it is hard to conceive.

Special customs, in matters of human intercourse; the customs of cities, boroughs, districts and villages, when they have become fixed by time, have always been respected by courts as the law of the region in which they obtain, whether or not there are general statutes of the realm or doctrines of the common law with which they are in conformity. The term "immemorial custom," is applied to that which, when shown to exist, is, in respect to the subject matter, the highest law. In old countries, where the origin of the custom, as well as of the people, is beyond the memory of the living—admitting of the presumption that the two had a common beginning—it is not, practically, incorrect. The rule is founded upon the idea that the custom is expository of the character of the inhabitancy; of which immemoriality is one of