“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