spirit of our Constitution and laws that women should be made
governors, judges, and sheriffs. This we are not yet prepared to
hold.

In our opinion, it is not the province of a court to attempt, by
giving a new interpretation to an ancient statute, to introduce
so important a change in the legal position of one-half the
people. Courts of justice were not intended to be made the
instruments of pushing forward measures of popular reform. If it
be desirable that those offices which we have borrowed from the
English law, and which from their origin some centuries ago down
to the present time, have been filled exclusively by men, should
also be made accessible to women, then let the change be made,
but let it be made by that department of the Government to whom
the Constitution has intrusted the power of changing the laws.
The great body of our law rests merely upon ancient usage. The
right of a husband in this State to the personal property of his
wife, before the act of 1861, rested simply upon such usage, yet
who could have justified this court if, prior to the passage of
that act, it had solemnly decided that it was unreasonable that
the property of the wife should vest in the husband, and this
usage should no longer be recognized? Yet was it not as
unreasonable that a woman by marriage should lose the title of
her personal property, as it is that she should not receive from
us a license to practice law? The rule in both cases, until the
law of 1861, rested upon the same common law usage and could have
pleaded the same antiquity. In the one case it was never
pretended that this court could properly overturn the rule, and
we do not see how we could be justified should we disregard it in
the other. The principle can not be too strictly and
conscientiously observed, that each of the three departments of
the Government should avoid encroachment upon the other, and that
it does not belong to the judiciary to attempt to inaugurate
great social or political reforms. The mere fact that women have
never been licensed as attorneys-at-law is, in a tribunal where
immemorial usage is as much respected as it is and ought to be in
courts of justice, a sufficient reason for declining to exercise
our discretion in their favor, until the propriety of their