"Were manifold and substantial. He began by at once so regulating the distribution of the business, as to remove all uncertainty of the matters which should be taken up each day, and to diminish both the expense, and the delay, and the confusion of former times. He restored to the whole bar the privilege of moving in turn, instead of confining this to the last day of the term. He almost abolished the tedious and costly practice of having the same case argued several times over, restricting such rehearings to questions of real difficulty and adequate importance." The benefits conferred upon the country were far greater. Burke, once quoting an argument of Solicitor-General, Murray, said that "the ideas of Murray go to the growing melioration of the law by making its liberality keep pace with the demands of justice and the actual concerns of the world—not restricting the infinitely diversified occasions of men and the rules of natural justice within artificial circumscriptions, but conforming our jurisprudence to the growth of our commerce and our empire."
The statement is just, and a finer panegyric it were impossible to write. Our limits, unfortunately, enable us only to indicate the achievements of Chief Justice Mansfield; but such indications must be given, however briefly. He found the common law of England a reproach, and, according to Professor Story, "he put England, America, and the whole civilized world under the deepest obligations" by the permanent improvement which he effected in the system. During the reign of George II. England had become the greatest manufacturing and commercial country in the world, but her jurisprudence had, in the meanwhile, made no provision whatever for the regulation of commercial 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 Councils were henceforward held without the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield in his place in Parliament stood by the Government, and vigorously defended them against a virulent Opposition. Pitt, "blasting his character," according to Horace Walpole, "for the sake of a paltry annuity and a long-necked peeress," had followed his ancient rival into the House of Lords, and by this suicidal act given Mansfield an immense advantage. Chatham, eager enough to tie his victim to the stake, was doomed to bitter disappointment in an arena utterly unfitted for the exercise of his peculiar powers. The atmosphere of the House of Peers, admirably suited to the calm dignity and sublime moderation of Mansfield, proved too often nipping frost to the burning declamation of the man whose very look could rouse a more popular assembly, and whose words oftener than once had inspired it with the noblest sentiments. It was not in the House of Lords that at this period of his history Lord Mansfield found his most dangerous opponent. A secret enemy had arisen in the outside world amongst the people, one even more unscrupulous than Chatham in his animosity: one who reveled in his questionable privilege of striking in the dark, and who justified abuse that knew no mercy, and acknowledged no law, by reiterated and fervid appeals to God and his country. The moral courage of Murray had once given way in the House of Commons, when Pitt, speaking daggers to him, and suddenly exclaiming, "Judge Festus trembles, he shall hear me another day," quietly sat down. But his sufferings were nothing compared with the torture his weakness underwent beneath the repeated inflictions of the unsparing Junius.
Toward the close of the year 1769 Junius sent forth his celebrated letter to the King, for the publication of which criminal informations were laid against Woodfall, as well as against Almon and Miller, who immediately reprinted the libel. "Rex v. Almon" was the first case brought to trial, and the jury found a general verdict of guilty. The defense set up in the trial against Woodfall was, that the letter was not libellous. The part which Lord Mansfield took is well known. He contended that
"All the jury had to consider was, whether the defendant had published the letter set out in the information, and whether the inuendos, imputing a particular meaning to particular words, as that 'the K——' meant His Majesty King George III., but that they were not to consider whether the publication was 'false and malicious,' these being mere formal words, and that whether the letter was libellous or innocent was a pure question of law, upon which the opinion of the court might be taken by a demurrer, or a motion in arrest of judgment."
The jury retired, and after some hours deliberation returned a verdict of "Guilty of the printing and publishing only." The attempt of Lord Mansfield to withdraw the cognizance of the question of libel from the jury to vest it in the court, contrary, as it unquestionably was, both to liberty and law, had high authorities for its justification, and was supported by the unanimous opinion of the judges who sat at his side. Posterity will acquit the otherwise upright judge of the moral obliquity of which his living enemies, with regard to this proceeding, pronounced him guilty, and for which Junius would have crushed the Chief Justice, had his ability been equal to his will.
It behooves the present generation to approach the lucubrations of the redoubted Junius in a spirit of enlightened discrimination. We must bear in mind that the poisoned arrows of the unseen combatant were discharged at a period peculiarly favorable for the exercise of his destructive skill; when startling invective was in fashion; when the mercenary acts of the foremost public man excused, if they did not justify, wholesale and unreflecting chastisement; when the public press was in its earliest infancy, and public writers had not yet educated the audience whose good sense now holds the libertinism of even the public censor in check, and provides its own best remedy against the crimes or follies of the pen. Junius but imitated the example of his betters when he fastened upon a foe, guilty or innocent, and heaped upon his head every opprobrious term a heated imagination could supply. A statesman's policy had but to be inconvenient to his adversary in order to prove the Minister "hateful," "execrable," "abominable," "wicked," a traitor to his country, and a conspirator against the liberties of the people. Pitt honored Walpole with such vituperation, and when Walpole went out, and Carteret came in without Pitt, the same expressive language was transferred by the illustrious commoner from Minister to Minister, as though no virtue could possibly be found in any Government without his presence. When Junius affected to regard Lord Mansfield as the incarnation of all that is odious in humanity, his praise of Lord Chatham knew no bounds; yet it is well known that under another disguise Junius dealt far severer blows against the patriot than he ever inflicted upon a man born, as he says, to abet despotism in its hateful attempts to trample upon the people's rights. Nothing can be more inconsistent than the accusations brought by Junius against Lord Mansfield. In one and the same breath he charges him with assuming an arbitrary power of doing right; so that if he does wrong it lies only between him and his conscience; and with condescending to evasive, indirect courses, in the temper of a quibbler. Now the Chief Justice is something more than a lawyer, now considerably less. At one moment he is setting common law at defiance, at another he is twisting the law to the purposes of corruption, and taking refuge behind the forms which he is expressly charged with heroically setting at defiance. Had Lord Mansfield been less timorous, Junius might have been less daring. At the close of one of his letters the reckless assailant writes "Beware how you indulge the first emotions of your resentment. This paper is delivered to the world, and cannot be recalled. The prosecution of an innocent printer cannot alter facts nor refute arguments. Do not furnish me with further materials against yourself." Another venomous diatribe ends with a similar threat. Dare "to represent this charge as a contempt of the authority of the House of Peers, and move their Lordships to censure the publisher of this paper, and I affirm that you support injustice by violence; that you are guilty of a heinous aggravation, of your offense; and that you contribute your utmost influence to promote, on the part of the highest court of judicature, a positive denial of justice to the nation!" Junius traded up on the invincible infirmity of a judge, who might have been destroyed by his weakness had he not been upheld by his unsullied purity and fame.
The attacks of Junius were not without effect on Parliament. A motion was made in the House of Commons for "a committee to inquire into the proceedings of the judges in Westminster Hall, particularly in cases relating to the liberty of the press." In the House of Lords Lord Chatham and Lord Camden re-echoed the charges of the House of Commons, and while the latter warned noble lords how they received the opinions in that House of the "most experienced lawyers" upon questions of law, the former, in his accustomed style, threatened to ring again and again "the alarm-bell of liberty," until he "could rouse the people to a proper sense of their injuries." Stung by persecution Lord Mansfield suffered himself to be betrayed into unaccountable error. Intimating one day that he had something of importance to bring to the notice of the House, he moved that their Lordships should be summoned to receive the communication. The appointed day arrived, and the attendance of peers was unusually large. Lord Mansfield rose amidst profound and anxious silence. Lord Chatham and Lord Camden had calumniated the judges, and they were now no doubt to be the objects of a vote of censure. Nothing of the kind. Lord Mansfield simply informed the House that he had left a paper with the clerk assistant containing the judgment of the Court of King's Bench in the case of "the King against Woodfall," and then, to the astonishment of every one, resumed his seat. Lord Camden rose and inquired whether the noble lord intended hereafter to found any motion on his paper? Lord Mansfield answered "No," and the House proceeded to other business. The very next day Lord Camden resumed the subject. He regarded the conduct of the Chief Justice as a challenge against himself, and he at once accepted it. In direct contradiction to Lord Mansfield he maintained that his doctrine was not the law of England. He had considered the noble lord's "paper," and had not found it very intelligible. He begged to propose four questions to the noble and learned lord, to which he required categorical answers, that their lordships might know precisely the points they had to discuss. The questions were submitted, and Lord Mansfield, instead of meeting them, "with most abject soothings," as Horace Walpole gleefully says, "paid the highest compliments to Lord Camden." He had the highest esteem for the noble and learned lord who thus attacked him, and had ever courted his esteem in return. He had not expected this treatment from his candor. It was unfair; he would not answer interrogatories. The reply was a signal for relentless torment. Not a peer interposed on his behalf. Distressed by his misery, Lord Mansfield sat down, remained still, and in sheer pity for their prey the dogs were called off.
In 1778 Lord Chatham died, and from the departure of the great commoner until his own decease Lord Mansfield occupied a more conspicuous place as a judge than as a politician in the public eye. He continued to display upon the bench, as heretofore, the keenest perception, a resolute obedience to the dictates of justice, high incorruptibility, great learning, and thorough self-devotion to his beloved and chosen occupation. He has been largely accused of favoring, in his early manhood, the designs of the Pretender, yet, from the beginning to the close of his public life, his fidelity to the reigning family could not be called in question. He has been charged with gratifying prerogative at the expense of law, yet the liberty of the law was never more perfect, the rights of the subject were never more secure, than during his long tenure of the judicial office. He has been stigmatized by Junius as an oppressor of men's consciences, yet no man of his time regulated his conduct with a stricter regard to the humanizing principle of religious toleration. Had Lord Mansfield been faithless to the people his death would never have been regarded as an irreparable loss by the whole country; had he been a bigot, the world would never have lost the treasures which it is said were consumed in the house burnt to the ground by zealous Protestants eager to take the life as well as to destroy the goods of Lord Mansfield, for no other reason than that he chose to hold the scales of justice fairly and steadily between Protestant and Catholic.