THE SUPREME COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA.
By Owen Wister.
II.
FROM THE PERIOD OF INDEPENDENCE.
CHIEF-JUSTICE THOMAS McKEAN received his commission on the 28th of July, 1777. In the March preceding, this position had been offered to Joseph Read. This gentleman was then with General Wash ington and the army, and saw fit to decline; and so Mr. McKean became the first Chief-Justice of the new sovereign State created by the Declaration of Independence, which he himself signed as one of the delegates from Delaware. Mr. McKean sat as Chief-Justice of the State of Pennsylvania from 1777 until 1799. He was twice recommissioned, — on July 29, 1784, and on July 29, 1791. These dates show that the term of dum bene se gesserint, desired so long before it had been attained, was supplanted by a time limit when only two Chief-Justices had held their title subject to its condition. These, it will be re membered, were William Allen and Benjamin Chew. There is no evidence that the system gave dissatisfaction, or in any manner inter fered with the proper administration of justice. On the contrary, William Allen's decisions went unquestioned in that day, as those of them that are still applicable do in this; and if Benjamin Chew, in spite of his failure to sympathize with the War of the Revolution, could be appointed Judge and President of the High Court of Errors and Appeals (October, 1791), after that war had come to a successful end, it is next to certain that the conduct of these two men had noth ing to do with the change. Most probably it may be laid to the reactionary temper of the times, through which ran a hasty and inordinate democratic sentiment that led men indiscriminately to distrust whatever of importance had been sanctioned under Eng land's discarded sway. The notion of any
man's holding any office possibly for life, was to the popular taste unpalatable; not because senility might at the last render him inefficient, but because everybody should have his turn, — a right vested alike in the expe rienced and the inexperienced by reason of their having been born equal. It has been said that Thomas McKean was the first real Chief-Justice of Pennsyl vania. This statement certainly has a po litical meaning, because he came first after the Revolution. But in the domain of the Common Law it carries no significance, un less the Declaration of Independence worked some magical change upon the Common Law. Such a change is not apparent in the books. The rights of the citizen to his life, his property, and so forth, were not altered because a certain colony became an inde pendent State. And as the Common Law was understood and administered before the Revolution well enough to cause the decis ions of that day still to stand as precedents for modern cases, Thomas McKean is not the beginning of any chain, but only a link in one that reaches from the Pennsylvania of the present across the sea to the Year Books, and back beyond them to unknown men whose minds and customs invisibly survive in every new volume of Reports. But Thomas McKean lived at an era in the country's history that afforded any man of native force and distinction continual chances to make himself remembered. Hence his work survives visibly; and as pa triot and judge of equal ability and deter mination, he stands one of the chief figures in the chronicles of his Commonwealth. Through the years preceding and during the Revolution, his activity and usefulness are something extraordinary; and when the
