Winter et al. v. United States.
must be presumed to have known at the date of the concession, and cannot therefore be permitted to derive any advantage from that circumstance; nor was he confined to the district of Arkansas in obtaining a surveyor. It was imposing no extraordinary hardship, and was indeed asking but little at his hands, to require a survey of this enormous gratuity.
Now as to conditions being inserted in Spanish concessions as matters of form only, it seems to me to be a singular position to assume before a judicial tribunal, and not less singular that proof of it should be adduced. If I am at liberty to disregard certain parts of this concession as being formal and not requiring observance, may I not with the same propriety reject the whole? And is this to be a rule in this kind of cases, and to form a landmark in their adjudication? Judicial decisions would then depend upon the integrity and intelligence of witnesses, not on the written law, and would vary as often as the opinions of men. Such proof can have no weight with me, because of its uncertainty, and because it contravenes known regulations and laws which existed in the Province of Louisiana, and which I prefer as guides to the loose declarations of witnesses of whom we know nothing.
While upon this point, I will also add, that if it was the usage at the post of Arkansas to designate lands by merely fixing some corner thereto, it was a usage repugnant and contrary to express written law, and therefore void. 1 Bl. Com. 77; 3 Term Rep. 271. No usage or custom can prevail against an express act of the lawmaking power.
If the performance of conditions was not required, they would hardly have been inserted; and the fact that surveys and occupation were required by the terms of almost every concession, are conclusive proof that so far from being matters of form, they were really matters of the first consequence, and indicated the permanent establishment of the only certain system of separating private grants from the public domain. According to my recollection, the civil law used in Spain, and introduced into the Province of Louisiana, was equally as strict as the common law with regard to exacting a compliance with conditions, and as rigidly excluded parol proof, either to change, vary, modify,
