The Study of Legal Biography 349
themselves were inadequate to deal. During the time of the Continental Congress, when we had no President, no real executive force, when we had but a single Legislative Chamber and no federal judiciary, how were questions of the conflicts of boundaries between the states to be settled? How questions between citizens of different colonies? How questions of prize and capture on the sea when a Pennsylvania privateer happened to share in the exploit of Captain Manly in an expedition fitted out under the auspices of the colony of Massachusetts? Here we had the germs of the federal jurisdiction pressing themselves in and upon the consideration of the members of the Continental Congress, seven of whom afterwards served as framers of the Constitution of the United States, and among them was that great man of Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth. So that the genesis of the statute is one of the rock-rib sources of our national jurisprudence and in that we reach the livingblaw. In the 25th section the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is described in words of light. Then think of the danger which threatened that statute. The greatest service that James Buchanan ever performed to the jurisprudence of the nation was to save that statute from repeal. The disciples of Thomas Jefferson, enraged at the extent and meaning and the application of Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Cohens v. State of Virginia, had a bill introduced into the House to repeal the 25th section of the Judiciary Act. A majority report was presented dissented from alone by James Buchanan, and in reading the minority report he said, "Instead of a bill to repeal the 25th section, this bill ought to be entitled a Bill to abolish the Supreme Court of the United States and to dissolve the Union," and the strength of his minority
report was such as to carry sufficient weight on the floor of the House to defeat the measure.
Now, these are mere illustrations to show that a knowledge of the statutes and cases and the judges who decide cases, can all be supplemented by a study of biography, by a collection of autographs and documents, and by the collection of pictures. Surely, gentlemen, we, as a body of lawyers—it matters not what the name of the state from which we come—are all members of the great federal republic which is our pride and our glory, and the state lines which separate us from each other are invisible. There is running through the whole science of jurisprudence a struggle to make, on earth, the closest approach, from the practical side, to the administration of the justice of the Most High. There is no more splendid political architecture ever conceived by the brain of man than the conception which entered into the brains of the framers of the Constitution of the United States when they conceived that great court, the Supreme Court of the United States, to regulate, without the spilling of a single drop of blood, all differences between citizens and foreigners, or citizens of different states, and to spread the mantle of the Constitution without stretching until its ample folds involved state after state with principles which are the bed-rock foundation of things which were rooted, not simply in Anglo-Saxon customs or Norman precedents, or Roman philosophy, or Hindu law, or Gentoo "codes," but principles which justify themselves to the intelligent appreciation of the scientific as well as the practical jurist, as being based, not alone on abstract philosophy, but based upon man as an individual hoping to realize, in his own case, the highest opportunities for individual advance
