Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/222

186 i86 HARVARD LAW REVIEW questions and difficulties in Massachusetts courts. It was not, until about the time when Shaw ceased to be Chief Justice, that either Boston or New York had succeeded in outstripping the old town of Salem in the competition for African, Asiatic and Pacific commerce. Moreover, commerce was in wooden vessels chiefly. Iron steam-vessels did not largely replace wooden vessels and packet lines and navigation by sails, until near the time of Shaw's resignation, and consequently made over the rules of admiralty and maritime commerce which had come down from the days of Columbus and the rules of Oleron. During the thirty years of Shaw's chief justiceship, steamships began to rule the ocean, and steam-engines and railroads began to take the place on land of the stagecoach and the baggage wagon. The entire body of railroad law grew up during the time when Shaw was Chief Justice. Street railways had not even been invented in 1830. Life insurance also had only begun in this country. The oldest life insurance company in this country, — the New Eng- land Mutual Life Insurance Company, — occupied, in i860, only a single floor over a store on State Street. It needed no more room to accommodate its President, Secretary and all its clerks. Emigrants came to America only in packet-line wooden vessels. Sleeping cars had not even been invented. No Pullman ever entered Boston until the Jubilee, after the Civil War, in 1865. Passenger travel between Washington and New York, in 1856, involved nine changes. Travelers had to make use of ferryboats, omnibuses and cars drawn by horses, as well as steam-engines, to pass between those cities prior to, and indeed mostly during, the Civil War. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, prospective miners from New England had two choices. They had either to go in sailing vessels round Cape Horn, or they could travel in caravans with horses from the Mississippi River over the Rocky Mountains. Fifty prospective gold seekers in New England would, at that time, often unite in buying as joint owners a vessel in Boston in order to sail round Cape Horn; and then work it around Cape Horn as sailors themselves, and finally sell the vessel when they reached San Francisco. It is simply true that the history of the country is best disclosed in the subject matter litigated in the reported cases. These new business devices created new rules of law, and new applica- tions of old rules. The decisions made while Shaw was on the bench, for this reason, possess peciiliar and unusual interest from the extraordinary and varied character of the litigated issues. Moreover, in Shaw's time courts did not try, as much as they do now, to decide every case by ruling only on one single point which could settle the single case at bar. For instance, when the statute for fish investigation came before the court, the Chief Justice discussed nearly every one of its provisions. He construed practically the whole statute in its different clauses. The residt was that that single opinion anticipated and prevented future disputes under the statute; and the statute never came before the court again for construction. To discuss Chief Justice Shaw's decisions, however, is quite beyond the scope of this article, and cannot be attempted. Besides their wide scope, and their novelty, and the habits of the court, bitter political fights were impending, and cast their shadows over the court. Controversies which brought on the Civil War raised great legal questions and resulted in decisions of too large moment to be here taken up. Judge Chase's book is well worth careful study for its discussion of them alone. Chief Justice Shaw's personality was not much more than a tradition before Judge Chase wrote his book. One little incident which shows how the Chief Justice not only declared the law, but obeyed it himself, is worth preserving. The writer's home in childhood was close to Judge Shaw's home on Mt. Vernon Street and naturally his person was familiar to all the children. One day a little playmate ran out of Belknap (now Joy) Street and was about to cross Mt. Vernon Street in front of the chaise of the Chief Justice, as he was driving