He deems that ancient common law laid down nothing concerning shoemakers, " for lord and lady, knight and esquire, all went barefooted; and possibly whoever lived in the days of the Druids might have counted the ten toes of her majesty the queen." He then opens his guns on the common law : — "In the old volumes of the common law we find knight-service, value and forfeiture of mar riage, and ravishments of wards; aids to marry lords' daughters, and make lords' sons knights. We find primer seisins, escuage, and monstrans of right; we find feuds and subinfeudations, link ing the whole community together in one gradu ated chain of servile dependence; we find all the strange doctrine of tenures, down to the abject state of villenage, and even that abject condition treated as a franchise. We find estates held by the blowing of a horn. In short, we find a jumble of rude, undigested usages and maxims of succes sive hordes of semi-savages, who, from time to time, invaded and prostrated each other. The first of whom were pagans, and knew nothing of divine law; and the last of whom came upon the English soil towards the decay of the Roman empire, when long tyranny and cruel ravages had destroyed every vestige of ancient science, and when the pandects, which shed the truest light that ever shone upon the English code, lay still buried in the earth." "Thus was this divine system delivered down by the Druids, who, after possessing all the learn ing of the western parts, were sent to perfect their studies in Mona, and there became so learned that they could neither read nor write."
northern hive, that poured forth its warlike prog eny. The historian of the five nations tells us that they consisted of so many tribes, or nations, joined together by a league or confederacy, like the United Provinces, and without any superiority the one over the other. This union, he adds, has continued so long that the Christians know noth ing of the original of it; the people in it are known by the English under the names of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. Here, then, is an ancestry fairly worth that of the great northern hive. The one had their MichellSynoth, or Witena-Gemot; the other their sachems or counsels." Quoting then from his associate, Coldcn's History of the Five Nations, that they " think themselves by nature superior to the rest of mankind, and call themselves Ongue honwee;" he goes on : — "Ongue honwee then say I, and away with your old barons, kings, monks, druids, your Michell-Synoth, and your Witena-Gemot. If we look to antiquity, the red men have it. If we regard duration, they have it still more, for the Picts and the Britons have long ceased to dye themselves sky-blue. The Indian paints himself for war even to this day. The one scalps the enemies of his tribe; the other burned their own women. The Saxons conveyed their lands by sod and twig; the Tuskaroras by the more elegant symbols of beaver and a belt."
Then after quoting Blackstone's eulogium on the common law, he continues : —
He argues that Christianity must have in troduced but little learning, " when the bare writing of a man's name would save him from the gallows." After pointing out the inconsistencies of the law, even in regard to right of clergy, he says : -—
"Now here is from the pen of the most pas sionate and eloquent eulogist, who had a profes sor's chair and a salary for praising the common law, an account of the true ancestry of this divine system. All I can say of it is this, that the same panegyric will apply totidem verbis to the institu tions of our red brethren, the Iroquois. The league of the five nations is similar to that of the heptarchy. Blackstone here tells us that the Saxon heptarchy was composed of Jutes, Saxons, angloSaxons, and the like; all sprung from the great
"When Blackstone employs his elegant pen to whiten sepulchres, and varnish such incongruities, it is like the Knight of La Mancha extolling the beauty and graces of his broad-back'd mistress winnowing her wheat or riding upon her ass "; and likens him to the hypochondriac who fancied him self pregnant, to whom his physician presented a hedgehog " as the fruit of his travail. He pressed the urchin with transport to his bosom and felt that it was prickly. He kissed it, and found its legs; he looked at it, and acknowledged that it
