42 LIFE OF 



Law ; and a Court of Chancery is the homage paid 

 by a free Constitution to the integrity of the Courts 

 of Common Law. It is the handmaid of those Courts. 

 It restrains dishonest men from applying the general 

 rules of those tribunals to cases which they ought not 

 to embrace, — it extends to the upright the benefit of a 

 rule of those Courts, of which a defect in circum- 

 stance deprived them,— and it attains its purposes by 

 a process, between parties, and through a method of 

 relief almost necessarily difiTerent from those of the 

 Courts of Common Law, but in perfect analogy with 

 what the rules of those Courts effect \vhere they pro- 

 perly apply. It is no more the reproach of the Com- 

 mon Law, that it has a department of Equity, than 

 that it has a department of Admiralty Law, or of 

 Ecclesiastical Law. There is no more reason why 

 the original constitution of the Courts of Common 

 Law siiould be destroyed, by blending with their 

 principles and practice, the rules of a Court of Chan- 

 cery, than by uniting with them the rules of the Ad- 

 miralty. It is a question of having two Courts to 

 execute different parts of the same system, instead of 

 one ; and the experience of England, and of most of 

 these States, is better than volumes, to show, that the 

 purity and vigour of both law and equity, are main- 

 tained by preventing their intercourse in the same tri- 

 bunal. That their separation is unfriendly to the 

 people, is refuted by the great examples of Maryland, 

 Virginia, and New York, and by the example of all 

 the States in tlieir Federal capacity. 



