Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/76

 The Law of the Land.

59

THE LAW OF THE LAND.

FROM LAW TO LAWYERS. By Wm. Arch. McClean. LAW is the all-powerful tail that wags this curious dog of a world. Society is bound together, dependent upon law for its preservation. Men respect the rights of fellow-men by reason of the consequences of the law following a disregard thereof. Every day the rights of thousands are preserved by fear of recourse to law. Each hour, minute, and second, mankind relies upon law to protect the faith upon which the business of the world is done. It is law that prevents the commission of wrongs, and punishes the wrong when done. And what is law? Blackstone, in the very beginning of his immortal work, says that "law is a rule of action prescribed by a supe rior power," and then proceeds to enlighten the reader as to the various species of the law and their interminable branches, dragging the uninitiated through the depths of corpo real and incorporeal hereditaments to lose him in tenures, freehold, and entailed estates; or, further on, teasing him with visions of how he may or may not inherit a fortune — all these fortunes have a predisposition for the vaults of the Bank of England — through his maternal grandfather or paternal great grandfather, or if he is a collateral heir, how far out the relationship may go before he lose his rights of representation, and thereby his fortune. After the foreign brain has swallowed a few large doses of this legal pottage, it is apt to feel choked, or as though it had wandered into an asylum of idiotic words that made its gray matter more idiotic than themselves. But take it in small doses, well chew and swallow slowly, and the eyes of the soul will open in wonder and awe by reason of the beauty, power, and symmetricalness of this

hand-book of the common-sense of the ages, and upon it will be bestowed a reverence, as making plain the law that commands what is right and prohibits what is wrong, so that to each and every one may be preserved his rights and liberties. Municipal or civil law is the branch of law most familiar to mankind, it is the " law of the land; " and this, Blackstone tells us, is "a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." That supreme power in these United States the preamble of our great constitution pro claims in its first words to be "We, the peo ple," — a supreme power that never changes, is always sovereign, and is the true royalty, so that subjects need no longer with fickle ness cry, " The king is dead, long live the king! " Here we are all kings and subjects. It has been seen what Blackstone says law is; but what is law? Law is the sifted common-sense of ages and civilizations. It is the richest cream of the common-sense of the universe, dedicated by man to the pres ervation of humanity. If it is this sifted common-sense, why do we hear of unjust laws, the law's delays, the miscarriages of law, and what not, until it seems that one must be bereft of all common-sense to ap peal to law? Why? The sieve has been the work of mortal hands, the meshes have been imperfectly plaited, and errors have slipped through. This cause time, to a certain extent, will remedy, when this sifted sense is resifted through some new sieve, — the gift of the wis dom and experience of centuries, invented by a later age. This resifting will be an endless, eternal,