Lord Eldon. effected a renovation and expansion justify ing his boast that the common law was able of its own force to " work itself clear." In Lord Mansfield, for perhaps the first time, the conception of the law as a science capa ble of growth and adaptation, composed of scientific principles to be extracted from the body of precedents and to be supplemented when necessary from other sources, found an exponent. The mere husk, the artificial forms that had survived their use, he was ready to dispense with, and in that direction was possibly over-radical; but of sound es tablished principles he was a careful con servator. Upon the tendencies aroused and fostered by a man of this character, enforced by his precepts and by the magic of his name dur ing a long term of judicial power, the hos tility of Lord Eldon fell like a blight. The accomplished Buller — adevoted follower and an almost idolatrous worshipper and disciple of Lord Mansfield, plainly designated by him as his intended successor — was passed over in favor of Lord Kenyon. The doctrines that the late Chief-Justice had advanced were derided, and his ability scouted. The work that he had begun was stopped, the spirit that he had excited was stifled, and in stead the cramping subservience to form and precedent characteristic of the ultra-con servative mind of the chancellor prevailed. The period that ensued, including and fol lowing the ascendancy of Lord Eldon, is plainly marked with his influence. It was a period of comparative stagnation. The law was administered by judges, many of them of masterly ability; but it was advanced and developed only slightly and very slowly. Bayley, Holroyd, Patteson, and their col leagues were men of profound learning in municipal law, and their judgments are of the highest authority; but the law was not to them, as it had been to Lord Mansfield, a science, calling for something of scientific pursuit. It was instead a fixed and inelastic code, and by them it was narrowed rather than broadened.
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If Lord Mansfield was urged by the eager impetus of his spirit to much that seems like judicial legislation, if he allowed his ideas of abstract right to lead him at times unduly to disregard the maxim of " stare decisis," yet he produced a legitimate effect of great and lasting value. He raised the law from the chaotic condition in which he found it, and placed it in a position from which it was never wholly dislodged. And he left as the result of his thirty years of labor something more valuable than a body of decisions, — a principle that has survived to the present day. On the other hand, Lord Eldon, guided by his reactionary senti ments, rejected the opportunity offered him. Conscientiously opposing the tendencies he found at work, he became an obstructionist in the march of juridical progress. His great abilities and tremendous power were directed to impeding and for the time stunt ing the growth that he could not prevent. The effect of his judgments has indeed been great and of permanent value in firmly establishing and crystallizing sound doc trines of law; but the more important and deeper effect that he might have wrought as the result of his personal influence, he failed to accomplish, for great as that in fluence was at the time, it was doomed to be overpowered and eventually to succumb to those forces to which it was so strenuously opposed. But though Lord Eldon's influence may not in all respects have been salutary, though he repressed much that was a healthy growth and opposed desirable tendencies, yet his character and his career were not such as to warrant a contemptuous judgment of him as a lawyer, far less a slighting opinion of him as a man. His conduct was the result of the deep-rooted convictions of his nature, a nature imbued with an extreme conservatism. In law, as in politics, he was one who " never ratted." As a man, right or wrong, he was loyal to his principles and faithful to his con ception of duty, and he deserved something better than the virulent invectives of the
