Mutable Law and Immutable Justice. edge of the right does not always necessitate the doing of it. Knowledge directs, but it is want and misery that drive. Political economy had condemned the corn laws for many years; yet it was not science, but the hunger of Ireland, that abolished them. Therefore it happens that as knowledge lags behind true conceptions of justice, so the inertia of society, indifferent and comfortable, lags behind knowledge. Expediency too will not sanction every change simply because it is theoretically just; since changes in law are generally ruinous to individuals, and the old and understood is always more se cure, though imperfect, than the new and strange. Old men dislike new ideas and new customs and new laws. Hence the conservative tendency of judicious age, which would rather keep to the tried and the tolerable than pursue the best. Hence the slowness with which law moves after equity. Every law-giver has been hampered by the material upon which he had to work. The iniquities which the legislature cannot re move hamper the judge. He strives after equity fettered by laws and precedents which the rules of his calling forbid him to break rudely, but allow him to stretch a little, and slip aside, when absolutely oppressive and moderately loose. He is not, like the legis lator, guided in the least by the clamors of the mob; his premises are generally given him, and his logic may be as perfect as his reasoning faculty can make it; but all his conceptions of equity are controlled by law. For him the maxim, which we dispute, Equitas sequitur legem, has a meaning and a force. It means, his ideas of equity must yield to his logical deductions from settled and existlng law. When some of his premises are not matters of law but of fact, then the fresh difficulty of ascertaining truth arises to per plex him. His ignorance of fact he ex changes for presumptions of law or nice bal ancing of evidence. In balancing evidence, he is doing his best; but in creating presump tions of law he is sometimes furnishing ex
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cuses to ignorance, over-indolent to seek earnestly after certainty, even when it is attainable. Some intensely practical lawyer may be asking, " What is the use of all this tedious disquisition to me? " And indeed, to satisfy some men on that score would be very diffi cult. Our object in what we have written was to stimulate thought, — to note the fact well, that human laws are not for all time, but only for a few generations; and to note the other fact, that, as civilization advances, they are superseded by closer approximations to abstract justice. That law has always been changing, and ever will, until the mil lennium at soonest, is a matter worth our friend the practical lawyer's while to know;, and few matters of knowledge could delight him more, we fancy. His work is never likely to fail unless club-law return. Since the distance between equity and law is so great, and the barriers in the way of union so strong and various, law must long continue mutable, — we may say, must ever continue so. For as the past has altered its laws, so will the future alter the laws of the present and its own. The circumstances of human life and the tendencies of human thought will vary, as they have varied, from age to age. As the past has been, so will the future be, — alike in mutability. Vain have the wishes of nations and of rulers been hitherto, that their laws should endure forever. The laws of Solon have lost their meaning, and the debased Greeks have had many law-givers not sages, since they stooped and fell from their high estate; no orator now, with Cicero, lauds the fragments of the twelve tables as the perfection of human wisdom; and the Medes, who boasted unchangeableness of their laws, are themselves abolished. Yet amid all this decadence of human laws, the laws which regulate the physical world have not altered. River and planet keep their course, day follows night, the seasons come in their order; there is lightning in the summer cloud, and snow in the thick dim breath of winter. Birth and
