Page:Borden v. State ex rel. Robinson.pdf/12

530 Then if it were conceded that notice before judicial sentence was a natural law, although not developed as such until after the establishment of the civil state, it could not be of universal obligation, even if it was the only law of all nature's enactment that bad laid dormant in her chancery until after the establishment of the civil state which gave occasion for its development.

But we have already remarked that the same process of reasoning which, after the establishment of the civil state would develope notice before judicial sentence as a law of nature, would develope many other rules which would be equally well authenticated as such. And as civilization and refinement might advance, some of these might be even better authenticated and therefore of paramount obligation. Not that the laws of nature (if any of these rules deserve that name) are unfixed or vanish before man's progress in the scale of civilization and refinement; but that human affairs by this advancement are ever shifting and as they pass more or less from the influence of one of these rules they pass in the same ratio within the more direct influence of another, or else develope a new rule by the same process that those already in existence were developed. And thus it is that some old rules come to have a more circumscribed sphere of action and others become entirely obsolete. When therefore mischief would flow into society by the too general operation of a given rule there would he the same authority in that society to restrict its operation within conservative limits either by positive enactment or else by giving freer, and, to this extent, paramount scope to some already existing countervailing rides, that there was in the first place to give sway to the rules thus curtailed; because the badge of its authenticity, which, in the first instance, consisted in its necessary agreeableness with the nature and state of man has ceased to accredit it to the full extent of its former operation, although it amply does so to a less extent. And there would therefore be the same authority for thus restricting its operation that there was for its original adoption and that authority derived from the same source. Nor would any of these rules or modifications of them be any the less