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the late William Eawle, Sr., and Thomas I. Wharton, to perform 

 this highly important work. The commissioners were employed 

 upon it for five years ; but it was suffered to expire before it was 

 completed. They reported annually to the Legislature, and many of 

 their bills were adopted, though some of the most important were 

 never acted upon. It is undoubtedly a useful and even necessary 

 work, from time to time, to revise and digest the statute laws. What- 

 ever opinion may be entertained upon the subject of codification 

 generally, this much will be yielded. Acts of Assembly are often 

 hastily penned by men who have no accurate knowledge of what the 

 law was before, or even if well drawn they are often attended in the 

 course of their passage by sudden amendments, hastily proposed and 

 adopted. In making such revision, however, two things ought care- 

 fully to be observed, — that there should be no such change of lan- 

 guage as would imply a change of the law, without a distinct report 

 that such was the intention. The second is, that all the acts thus 

 revised should be expressly repealed by their titles. The commis- 

 sioners were not as careful as they might have been in these respects. 

 It was perhaps their intention, at the close of their labors, to have 

 reported a list of all the acts to be repealed, but it was never reached ; 

 and the consequence is, that, under the general clause repealing all 

 such statutes or parts of statutes as were supplied by the Revised 

 Code, the old statutes must still be referred to and studied to see if 

 all their provisions have been supplied ; and it is often an embarrass- 

 ing question to determine how far they have been. As to the first 

 point, the neglect of it has rendered it necessary for the Supreme 

 Court to adopt a new canon of interpretation for the Revised Code 

 specially; and the same thing has been done in New York. In 

 other respects, though very slow in their labors, the commissioners 

 evinced great learning and a sound conservative spirit in desiring 

 rather to adapt the plastic character of our common-law forms of 

 procedure to the objects of chancery jurisdiction, without creating 

 separate courts of equity or vesting the judges of the common- 

 law courts with unusual powers without the intervention of a jury. 

 The opinion is a very common one at the bar, that it would have 

 been better that our old familiar system of law and equity, alike 

 administered by court and jury, which grew up among us by custom, 

 — the silent legislation of the people, — had been continued and ex- 

 tended, rather than the present hybrid system introduced — law and 

 equity on one side of the court, and equity exclusively on the other 

 — in which the orator for equity grounds his bill for relief upon what 



