“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.