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As a result, the injunction writ, originally the high prerogative of the crown and its highest officers, has now become the weapon of all judges, even in some States of inferior magistrates, and has been used with a confusion and recklessness that have gone far to justify the complaint of labor interests. On the other hand, we have grown less jealous of preserving our common-law jury rights.

Under the statute now in force the common-law procedure in each Federal court is made to conform to the procedure in the State in which the court is held. In these days, when we should be making progress in court procedure, such a conformity statute makes the Federal method too dependent upon the action of State legislatures.

In everything else you have a right to a hearing, if not an appeal to the common-law courts and a jury; but the power of a building inspector is that of an Oriental despot. He can order you summarily to do a thing, or do it himself; or destroy or condemn your property; and you have no redress, nor compensation, nor even a lawsuit to recover compensation.

The framers of the Bill appear to have overlooked, or laughed to scorn, the ancient common law of the land which prohibits the establishment of any fair or market within "a third part of twenty miles" from one already in existence. This common-law right has been further specially confirmed, so far as the City of London is concerned, by an Act of Parliament in the reign of the third Edward.

"In Lord Mansfield's time," Erskine once said to Lord Campbell, "although the King's Bench monopolized all the common-law business, the court often rose at one or two o'clock the papers, special, crown, and peremptory, being cleared; and then I refreshed myself by a drive to my villa at Hampstead."

We are to be protected, not arraigned, and are not to give reasons for our judgment; therefore I desire to be excused giving any." Mr. Justice Eyre maintained the same dignified tone, and at length the House of Lords abandoned its fruitless struggle with the common-law Judges.

Whosoever had gone out of Fleet Street into the Temple at the date of this history, and had wandered disconsolate about the Temple until he stumbled on a dismal churchyard, and had looked up at the dismal windows commanding that churchyard until at the most dismal window of them all he saw a dismal boy, would in him have beheld, at one grand comprehensive swoop of the eye, the managing clerk, junior clerk, common-law clerk, conveyancing clerk, chancery clerk, every refinement and department of clerk, of Mr Mortimer Lightwood, erewhile called in the newspapers eminent solicitor.

Yet although the colonies were already under military occupation, and their courts and legislatures more than unpopular with the home government, these British soldiers were tried for manslaughter and murder, not in England, but in the ordinary common-law courts of the Colony of Massachusetts. James Otis defended them and they were acquitted.

Without interfering with the authority already possessed by the Trinity House, this report states that the crown had also a power and right by the common-law to erect such houses. ‘And therefore,’ says the report, ‘howsoever the ordinary authority and trust for the performance of this service is committed to the said corporation alone, as persons of skill and trust to that purpose, yet if they be not vigilant to perform it in all places necessary, his majesty is not restrained to provide them according to his regal power and justice, for the safety of his subjects’ lives, goods, and shipping, in all places needful.’

In other words, all the cases under the statute which have now been decided would have been decided the same way if the court had originally accepted in its construction the rule at common law. It has been said that the court, by introducing into the construction of the statute common-law distinctions, has emasculated it. This is obviously untrue.