ial dealings. When questions arose affecting
purchases and sales, the affreightment of ships, marine insurances, bills
of exchange, and promissory notes, it was impossible to decide them;
there were no cases to refer to, no treatises to consult. Lord Mansfield
grappled with the difficulty and overcame it. His judicial decisions
supplied the deficiencies of law and became themselves law. His mode
of procedure was as philosophical as it was bold. From every case that
came before him he extracted a general principle of universal
application, and availed himself of it not only to rule the particular
case under consideration, but to serve as a guide in all similar cases
hereafter; and he would enlarge upon the principle thus brought out
until, as his contemporaries declare, all listeners were lost in
admiration at the strength and stretch of his understanding. Lord
Campbell tells us that the common law of England which Lord Mansfield had
to administer upon his elevation to the bench, "was a system admirably
adapted to the condition of England in the Norman and early Plantagenet
reigns, whence it sprang up." As high an authority in America declares
that

"Wherever commerce shall extend its social influences, wherever justice
shall be administered by enlightened and liberal rules, wherever
contracts shall be expounded upon the eternal principles of right and
wrong, wherever moral delicacy and judicial refinement shall be infused
into the municipal code, at once to persuade men to be honest and to keep
them so; wherever the intercourse of mankind shall aim at something more
elevating than that groveling spirit of barter in which meanness, and
avarice, and fraud strive for the mastery over ignorance, credulity, and
folly, the name of Lord Mansfield will be reverenced, not only for
adapting the inefficient system which he found to the exigencies of his
own age in his own country, but for furnishing forever the great laws
founded upon everlasting truth and justice to the whole family of man."

In 1760 George III. ascended the throne, and Mansfield became a member of
the Cabinet, of which Bute was at the head. Ten years afterward the Chief
Justice prudently withdrew from the intimate connection with the
Government, into which he ought never to have entered, and seven years
Before his retirement the brief, though magnificent authority of Bute,
had been shattered to pieces, and the Minister himself disgraced. But,
although Cabinet C