Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/768

736 The spirit of legal interpretation. [1776-1900 said to have done more than almost any other magistrate in the world towards adapting the old English law of partnerships to the rapid de- velopment of joint-stock companies, and the old law of common carriers to the new facts of railway transport. In general, however, such legal genius has been rare. The impression which results from wide reading of American law reports is, on the whole, that substantial justice and practical good sense are more frequent than one would have expected, but that the principles by which decisions are justified and the dicta in which they are often swathed are apt to be bewildering. Despite frequent lack of training, the American judiciary has generally been more than respectable in its devotion to duty, no less than in its sagacity. It has instinctively accepted its real office, which has been to establish and to preserve such order as should enable the community to manage its affairs prosperously. It has always remembered that, in so doing, it must pretend to base its decisions on principles presumed to be established. But, so long as a decision referred to these principles has proved momentarily efficient, it has rarely troubled itself much about their historic truth or their technical validity. The state of law thus rapidly sketched persists. It is a natural development of the inevitable legal makeshifts to which America has been habituated from colonial times ; and it has resulted in a general faith, almost amounting to superstition on the part of Americans in general, that the law may be trusted. Legislation, on the whole, is apt to be blindly radical ; the Courts, on the other hand, are apt to be instinctively conservative. If this conservatism goes too far, legislation may temper it. If legislation in its turn goes too far, it may either be amended or like some preposterous Acts, for example, concerning the sale of intoxicating drink it may, without practical inconvenience, be suffered to fall into neglect. Like the Elizabethan English, from whom they can trace their national descent, the Americans are fond of lofty prin- ciples ; like them again, they are eminently practical in their conduct of daily affairs; and another point of resemblance they are apt to trouble themselves very little concerning the logical harmony of edifying precept and efficient practice. The justification of their inconsistencies must be found, as is the case with that older England, in the thoughtless honesty with which they youthfully ignore them. How natural such a temper must be in America will become more evident when we turn to the consideration of American philosophy. In its origin, as we have seen already, the philosophical thought of America was dogmatically religious. The colonists of Virginia, and even the more tolerant Quakers of Pennsylvania, were apt to be primarily men of affairs. The dominant class in early New England, on the other hand, was the Puritan clergy; and although, for almost two hundred years, they retained at least traces of the political energy which once came