The Green Bag 348
pendence. There were more copies of Blackstone's Commentaries sold in the thirteen colonies than there were in London. The first American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries was published in Philadelphia just five years after the appearance of the first edition in London. In 1772 twenty-five hundred American lawyers subscribed for that book and at the very head of the list of subscribers stands the name of John Adams of Massachusetts. English common law had a new birth on this continent owing to that very circumstance, and therefore it is that whether in crowded cities, on the plains, in valleys, among the mountains, or on the shores of our Great Lakes, and along the banks of our mighty rivers the great commentator for years was omnipresent.
Now to this may be added the thought that it is not alone to the lives of our judges, or to the lives of our commentators and our great authors that we must turn, to properly appreciate the full value of this as an aid to the mastery of the various and ill-sorted learning of the law, but we must take the statutes and we must take the cases. Cases themselves must have an ancestry. Judges cannot usurp jurisdiction. They cannot, however philosophically inclined, settle doubts, or contrive that an issue shall be evolved on the records brought to them for decision. It is one of the extraordinary things that had John Marshall gone to his grave after only fifteen years of service only one great decision of his would have appeared, the case of Marbury v. Madison, but all the other great cases which have made his name immortal occurred in the second half of his career. Why? Because the country had not grown up during the earlier years of his judicial incumbency; time was required for the evolution of the
raising of the questions in Cohen v. Virginia, Gibbons v. Ogden and McCullough v. Maryland. They were in embryo awaiting the decision of that great mind which was to move like Newton's, or Keppler's, or Copernicus', in the settlement of principles which should guide our legal astronomy and dominate our legal heavens forever.
We take the statutes. Statutes, too, have a biography. They are not dead things. They are the will of the people crystallized into law. Do we not ask ourselves the question: How was it that in such a degraded and degenerate age as that of Charles the Second a statute such as that against Frauds and Perjuries should happen to be passed? Is it enough simply to say that the 17th clause is enforced in most of the states of the Union? We require to know something about the history of those times and why it was that those various sections had to be put in the form of some statutory expression of the will of the English Parliament in order to guide judges in their determination of matters and principles which lie at the foundation of jurisprudence. Take a national illustration. Our great Judiciary Act of 1789 can be personified in the same way. The 25th section particularly provided for the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. Surely, when we read the journals of the Continental Congress and the letters that George Washington addressed to the Governors of the different states, and his correspondence with the members of the Continental Congress, we find that Washington, being the focus upon which all the converging rays of dissatisfaction were centred, saw as no other man saw the necessity for a great, strong, federal, central jurisdiction which should regulate and control matters with which the state governments
