Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/497

469 JUDICIAL CONFLICT. 4^9 feelings. The word " neighborly " springs from this creditable disposition in human nature. One sees, therefore, that A. and B., Hving for years next each other, being more or less intimate, each depending on the other for society and possibly for aid in time of trouble, are likely to retain friendly relations. Let the occasion arise for discovering that one has been occupying for twenty years a strip of land belonging to the other. This land he has all along supposed was his own, and he always meant to hold it as such. To such a man the word " hostile" has a meaning which he would shrink from attaching to the purpose of which he is conscious in occupying the land in question. The law looks to the visible outward act. The intention to occupy as his own is undisputed. Occupancy for twenty years brings his case within the general rule, unless, indee'd, to use the language of Chief Justice Hosmer, " the invisible motives of the mind are to be explored." An objection to inquiring into hidden motives, and searching the conscience for the moral element in- volved in the act of possession, lies in the very fact that it assumes to deal with a man's motives. It works unjustly, — is not capable of being applied so as even approximately to deal out a measure of justice to ever>'body. Besides, it violates the principle upon which the doctrine of adverse possession rests ; namely, that possession for a long period presumes the existence of a legal right. This principle harmonizes with what is called "a statute of repose." It is for the interest of the public that lapse of time should create, if not a positive right, at least the privilege of not being disturbed. To sustain a rule founded upon this wise provision there must be some absolute standard of what constitutes an adverse posses- sion. Fencing in land, and occupying it for a long period under a claim that it is his own, would seem reasonably to satisfy the con- ditions of such a standard. There is much good sense in what the court in Connecticut, speaking through its chief justice, says : " The person who enters on land believing and claiming it to be his own does thus enter and possess (i. e. adversely). The ver>^ nature of the act is an assertion of his own title, and the denial of the title of all others. It matters not that the possessor was mistaken, and had he been better informed would not have entered on the land. This bears on another subject, the moral nature of the action ; but it does not point to the inquiry of adverse possession. Of what consequence is it to the person disseised that the disseisor is an honest man?