Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/376

344 judges in England since the days of William the Norman. To merely take up a volume of reports and to see that Mr. Justice Ashhurst said so-and-so, and Mr. Justice Buller said so-and-so, and Mr. Justice Patteson said another thing, is a matter of very little real consequence to us unless we have some sort of knowledge of the true value of that man's work in his position as a judge. In this age when we are overburdened with the multitude of decisions, and where frequently the active practitioner is looking out not for the strong judgment but simply for the last ruling on the case, it must be of inﬁnite assistance to counsel, in discussing intelligently and scientiﬁcally before the court of last resort, where they wish to weed out what happens to be ephemeral, or extraneous, or irrelevant, or merely of temporary importance, from those golden strands which alone should enter into the imperishable fabric of jurisprudence, to have a clue to a knowledge of the man and to the value of his work. This is a laborious task, but it is a most absorbing and most fascinating one. Cases themselves, unless properly understood as to their history, are sometimes misleading. I recollect being very much impressed, some years ago, by looking into that extraordinary book, so far as its scholarship is concerned, known as "The Reporters," by John William Wallace, Reporter of the Supreme Court of the United States, in which, when he was the librarian of our Law Association of Philadelphia, he dealt with most of the old common law reporters and old equity reporters from Atkyns down to Ventris and Vesey. He attempted to give a systematic and illustrative description of the character and the value of the reporter, and there dwelt on two striking instances. One of the cases involved the fate of a throne

and was followed by the beheading of a king; and the other involved the foundations of a great branch of equity jurisprudence. When Charles the First was engaged in his unhappy differences with his Parliament be relied on a learned Attorney-General, Sir William Noy, for guidance, who, in drawing on his recondite knowledge of the law, attempted to justify the King's exercise of his prerogative by certain old cases which he had found in some antiquated reports. He either lacked the requisite knowledge, historically, to be able to properly appraise the circumstances under which those decisions were given, or else he lacked courage to be frank with his Sovereign and tell him that they were dangerous precedents to follow, but he threw his weight in that national struggle upon those precedents against the rising powers of the people. The result was that Charles the First lost his throne. He was beheaded through the ignorance or weakness of his Attorney-General in misreading precedents. The other instanoe was a case reported in the 4th Wheaton, where even so high an authority as Chief Justice Marshall—and his opinion was concurred in by Mr. Justice Story—went so far as to subvert the foundations of equity jurisprudence with regard to a trust in favor of a charity where the object of the charity was vague and indeﬁnite. The poison crept into the veins of your sister state of Connecticut. It has even, in recent times, affected the jurisprudence of our distant sister state of Oregon. It did not attack you here, nor did it attack Massachusetts, but it did assail us in Pennsylvania, when the great merchant, Stephen Girard, attempted to establish a charity which at the present time sparkles like a jewel on the brow of the adopted city of the French merchant, and Daniel