Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/345

 9. HOLDSWORTH: THE LAW MERCHANT 331 ordinary courts of law or equity if it was to be made to har- monize with the now estabhshed principles of English law. The complete incorporation of the Law Merchant with the common law was not effected till the time of Lord Mansfield. Up to his time mercantile business had been divided between the courts of law and equity. No attempt had been made to reduce it to a system. ^ This Lord Mans- field accomplished, and this entitles him to the fame of being " the founder of the commercial law of this country." ^ The Law Merchant has ceased to be a separate body of law administered by separate courts : " it is neither more nor less than the usages of merchants and traders . . . ratified by the decisions of courts of law, which upon such usages being proved before them, have adopted them as settled law.'*^ positions be examined and decided by the rules of those laws, so far forth as the same doth concern Merchants or Merchandizes, as well as by the rules of our Common Law of England? " Cp. Bate's case (1606) 2 S. T. at p. 389. ceeding with great caution, not establishing any general principle, but decreeing on all the circumstances of the case put together. Before that period we find that in courts of law all the evidence in mercan- tile cases was thrown together; they were left generally to a jury, and they produced no established principle. From that time we all know the great study has been to find some certain general principles, which shall be known to all mankind, not only to rule the particular case then under consideration, but to serve as a guide for the future. ... I should be very sorry to find myself under a necessity of differing from any case on this subject which has been decided by Lord Mans- field, who may be truly said to be the founder of the commercial law of this country," Buller J. Lickbarrow v. Mason (1793) 1 S. L. C. 674, 685. » Goodwin v. Robarts (1875) L. R. 10 Ex. 337, 346; cp. Brandao ▼. Barnett (1846) 12 CI. and Fin. 787, and Edelstein v. Schuler and Co. L. R. (1902) 2 K. B. 144, 154.
 * Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, ii 402, 403.
 * " We find in Snee v. Prescott that Ld. Hardwicke himself was pro-