the laws of 1661-2; the uniform current of opinions and
decisions; and in the general recognition of all our statutes framed
on that basis. But the state of the English law at the date of
our emigration, constituted the system adopted here. We may doubt,
therefore, the propriety of quoting in our courts English authorities
subsequent to that adoption; still more, the admission of authorities
posterior to the Declaration of Independence, or rather to the accession
of that King, whose reign, _ab initio_, was that very tissue of wrongs
which rendered the Declaration at length necessary. The reason for it
had inception at least as far back as the commencement of his reign.
This relation to the beginning of his reign, would add the advantage of
getting us rid of all Mansfield's innovations, or civilizations of the
common law. For however I admit the superiority of the civil, over the
common law code, as a system of perfect justice, yet an incorporation of
the two would be like Nebuchadnezzar's image of metals and clay, a thing
without cohesion of parts. The only natural improvement of the common
law, is through its homogeneous ally, the chancery, in which new
principles are to be examined, concocted, and digested. But when,
by repeated decisions and modifications, they are rendered pure and
certain, they should be transferred by statute to the courts of common
law, and placed within the pale of juries. The exclusion from the courts
of the malign influence of all authorities after the _Georgium sidus_
became ascendant, would uncanonize Blackstone, whose book, although the
most elegant and best digested of our law catalogue, has been perverted
more than all others to the degeneracy of legal science. A student finds
there a smattering of every thing, and his indolence easily persuades
him, that if he understands that book, he is master of the whole body
of the law. The distinction between these and those who have drawn their
stores from the deep and rich mines of Coke's Littleton, seems
well understood even by the unlettered common people, who apply the
appellation of Blackstone-lawyers to these ephemeral insects of the law.

Whether we should undertake to reduce the common law, our own, and
so much of the English statutes as we have adopted, to a text, is a
question of transcendant difficulty. It was discussed at the first
meeting of the committee of the revised code, in 1776, and decided
in the negative, by the opinions of Wyt