serve his independence on the same bench with Marshall." (The Writings of Jefferson, Vol. IX, 275.) Jefferson believed, as the same letter shows, that Marshall's influence was due to cunning and sophistry. This theory seems to me effectually disproved by the relation which Judge Story for more than twenty years sustained to his chief. Story went upon the Bench an ardent young disci ple of Democracy. He soon became an en thusiastic admirer of Marshall, concurred in most of his constitutional opinions, and loved him with devoted affection. Could a man of Story's intellect have been systemat ically deceived for twenty-three years by "cunning and sophistry"? The answer is not doubtful. It was the intrinsic merit of Mar shall, both intellectually and morally, which accounts for his influence over his gifted as sociate.1 MARSHALL'S PLACE AS JUDGE. Among the great Judges who adorn the annals of English and American jurispru dence there stand forth conspicuously four names, to whom it was the fortune to in augurate, as it were, a new era in the law, to broaden its principles and to establish prece dents which have controlled and directed the principles upon which the law is adminis tered. Each of them enjoyed long tenure of office and each in his day commanded the reverence and secured the applause of the profession. Hardwicke, building upon the improvements in the administration of equity, introduced by Nottingham, raised this branch of the law into a science and firmly established the wholesome and valua ble jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery. Mansfield, bringing to the administration of the King's Bench his cultivated intellect and profound learning, and aided by knowledge and experience in the civil law, rescued the common law from the narrow technicalities so dear to the sergeants and laid broad and deep the principles of the law merchant. Sir 1 Professor Jeremiah Smith, of the Law School of Har vard University.
William Scott, Lord Stowell, raised the Ec clesiastical and Admiralty Courts above the petty questions, crude methods and narrow principles which before his time character ized them and created a body of admiralty and ecclesiastical law in decisions, whose charm and beauty of diction are still the ad miration and envy and despair of the profes sion. Marshall excelled each of these in his massive intellect and convincing logic, and created a body of constitutional law, in which he had no other guide than his own intellect and for which the precedents were to be created by himself.1 Marshall had not the technical learning in the common law of Coke, or of several of Coke's successors. But, in the felicitous words of Mr. Justice Story, "he seized, as it were by intuition, the very spirit of juridical doctrines, though cased up in the armor of centuries; and he discussed authorities, as if the very minds of the Judges themselves stood disembodied before him." He had not the learning of Nottingham or of Hardwicke in the jurisdiction and practice of the Court of Chancery, or of Mansfield in the general maritime law. But his judg ments show that he was a master of the principles of equity, and of commercial law. He had not the elegant scholarship of Stowell. But it is not too much to say that his judgments in prize causes exhibit a broader and more truly international view of the law of prize. Upon the question of the exemption of ships of war and some other ships, as it was observed by Lord Justice Brett in the English Court of Appeal in 1880, "the first case to be carefully considered is. and always will be, The Exchange," de cided by Chief Justice Marshall in 1812.» Marshall possessed intellectual powers of the highest order. The commanding fea tures of his mind were calmness, penetration 1 Honorable Charles H. Simonton, United States Circuit Judge. ' Honorable Horace Gray, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
