1884. COURTS OF CHANCERY, Lord Mansfield and.—
Unhappily for England a
very unexpected revolution is working in
their laws of late years. Lord Mansfield, a
man of the clearest head and most seducing
eloquence, coming from a country where the
powers of the common law and chancery are
united in the same court, has been able since
his admission to the bench of judges in England,
to persuade the courts of common law
to revise the practice of construing their text
equitably. the object of former judges has
been to render the law more and more certain;
that of this person to render it more uncertain
under pretence of rendering it more
reasonable. No period of the English law, of
whatever length it be taken, can be produced
wherein so many of its settled rules have been
reversed as during the time of this judge.
His decisions will be precious in those States
where no chancery is established; but his accession
to the bench should form the epoch,
after which all recurrence to English decisions
should be proscribed in those States which
have separated the two courts. His plan of
rendering the Chancery useless by administering
justice in the same way in the courts
of common law has been admirably seconded
by the celebrated Doctor Blackstone, a judge
in the same department, who has endeavored
seriously to prove that the jurisdiction of the
Chancery is a chaos, irreducible to system,
insusceptible of fixed rules, and incapable of
definition or explanation. Were this true,
it would be a monster whose existence should
not be suffered one moment in a free country
wherein every power is dangerous which is
not bound up by general rules.—
To Phillip Mazzei.
Ford ed., iv, 115.
(P.
1785)
