learning is regarded; and how implicitly, where the inhabitants are not very rich, a rich man is hearkened to and followed.  In a place like Campbelltown, it is easy for one of the principal inhabitants to make a party.  It is easy for that party to heat themselves with imaginary grievances.  It is easy for them to oppress a man poorer than themselves; and natural to assert the dignity of riches, by persisting in oppression.  The argument which attempts to prove the impropriety of restoring him to the school, by alleging that he has lost the confidence of the people, is not the subject of juridical consideration; for he is to suffer, if he must suffer, not for their judgment, but for his own actions.  It may be convenient for them to have another master; but it is a convenience of their own making.  It would be, likewise, convenient for him to find another school; but this convenience he cannot obtain.  The question is not, what is now convenient, but what is generally right.  If the people of Campbelltown be distressed by the restoration of the respondent, they are distressed only by their own fault; by turbulent passions and unreasonable desires; by tyranny, which law has defeated, and by malice, which virtue has surmounted.

[1] See Blackstone’s Comment, i. 453.

VITIOUS INTROMISSION.

[This argument cannot be better prefaced than by Mr. Boswell’s own exposition of the law of vitious intromission.  He was himself an advocate at the Scotch bar, and of counsel in this case.  “It was held of old, and continued for a long period, to be an established principle in Scotch law, that whoever intermeddled with the effects of a person deceased, without the interposition of legal authority to guard against embezzlement, should be subjected to pay all the debts of the deceased, as having been guilty of what was technically called vitious intromission.  The court of session had, gradually, relaxed the strictness of this principle, where an interference proved had been inconsiderable.  In the case of Wilson against Smith and Armour, in the year 1772, I had laboured to persuade the judge to return to the ancient law.  It was my own sincere opinion, that they ought to adhere to it; but I had exhausted all my powers of reasoning in vain.  Johnson thought as I did; and in order to assist me in my application to the court, for a revision and alteration of the judgment, he dictated to me the following argument.”—­Boswell, ii. 200.]

This, we are told, is a law which has its force only from the long practice of the court; and may, therefore, be suspended or modified as the court shall think proper.