246 LOVE OF ANCIENT MAXIMS. 



while progress is written in letters of living light upon all 

 other things, that remains stationary at least in a com- 

 parative sense. The world moves on, civilization advances, 

 science and the arts stride forward, but the law stands still. 

 A principle which may have been somewhat changed, modi- 

 fied, bent, if you please, into an adaptation to the exigencies 

 of the present, and a fitness for the changed circumstances 

 of the times in which we live, is suddenly thrown back into 

 its old position by the exhumation of some ' decision ' from 

 the dust of ages, made by some judge away back in the 

 olden tunes, resurrected by the research of some antiquarian 

 lawyer, who loves to delve among the rubbish of past genera- 

 tions. The learning, the wisdom, the philosophy of the pre- 

 sent is discarded, and the spirits of a lower civilization are con- 

 jured from the darkness of vanished centuries, to settle rules 

 for the government of commerce, personal conduct, and the 

 social relations of the times in which we live. There seems 

 to be something paradoxical in the idea that the older the 

 decision the better the law the more ancient the commen- 

 tator, the profounder the wisdom of his axioms. This might 

 be well, were it true that civilization is ' progressing back- 

 wards,' the science of government retrograding. In that 

 case, it would of course be true, that the nearer you ap- 

 proach the fountain, the purer the stream would be. But 

 such is not the fact. In all these attributes the world is on 

 the advance, the science of government progressive ; and to 

 make the wisdom of centuries ago override the wisdom, or 

 overshadow the light of the present, is a paradox peculiar 



