I have said that judges are not commissioned to make and unmake rules at pleasure in accordance with changing views of expediency or wisdom. Our judges cannot say with Hobbes: "Princes succeed one another, and one judge passeth, another cometh; nay heaven and earth shall pass, but not one tittle of the law of nature shall pass, for it is the eternal law of God. Therefore, all the sentences of precedent judges that have ever been, cannot altogether make a law contrary to natural equity, nor any examples of former judges can warrant an unreasonable sentence or discharge the present judge of the trouble of studying what is equity in the case he is to judge from the principles of his own natural reason."[1] Nearer to the truth for us are the words of an English judge: "Our common law system consists in applying to new combinations of circumstances those rules of law which we derive from legal principles and judicial precedents, and for the sake of attaining uniformity, con-
- ↑ Hobbes, vol. II, p. 264; quoted by W. G. Miller, “The Data of Jurisprudence," p. 399.
