iple of leaving
the greatest liberty of private judgment and action, consistent with
public peace and private security. A blind attachment to principles of
jurisprudence or rules of law because they are ancient, when the
advancement of the useful arts, the new combinations of trade and
business, and the influence of more rapid and general intercourse demand
their repeal or modification, is as much to be deprecated as rash
innovation and unceasing experiment. Indeed it scarcely ever fails to
defeat its own end, and though it may retard for a while, renders the
course of reform more destructive than it otherwise would have been.
True conservatism is gradualism--the movement onward by slow, cautious,
and firm steps--but still movement, and that onward. The world, neither
physically, intellectually, nor morally, was made to stand still. As in
her daily revolutions on her own axis as well as her annual orbit round
the sun, she never returns precisely to the same point in space which
she has ever before occupied, it would seem to be the lesson which the
Great Author of all Being would most deeply impress upon mind as he has
written it upon matter; "by ceaseless motion all that is subsists."

What has thus been very cursorily presented will evince that it is the
province of legislation, by slow and cautious steps, to amend the laws,
to render them more equal in their operation upon all classes, not
favoring the rich more than the poor, nor one class of either more than
another, providing an easy, cheap, and expeditious administration of
justice by tribunals, whose learning and impartiality shall be so
secured as to possess the confidence of the community, and by general
rules for the regulation of conduct and the distribution of estates most
conformed to the analogies of that system, which is familiar to the
people in their common law.

Great as is the influence which the profession of the law can and does
exercise upon the legislation of a country, the actual administration of
law is entirely in their hands. To a large extent by private counsel, by
the publication of works of research and learning, by arguments in
courts of justice to assist those who are to determine what is the law,
and to apply it to the facts, as well as in the actual exercise of
judicature, this whole important province of government, which comes
home so nearly to every man's fireside, is intrusted necessarily to
lawyers.

In this country we live unde