How otherwise could they ever have become
established, as Blackstone says they were, "by long and
immemorial usage, and by their universal reception throughout
the kingdom,"- 1 Blackstone,63-67., when, as the Mirror says,
"justice was so done, that every one so judged his neighbor, by
such judgment as a man could not elsewhere receive in the like
cases, until such times as the customs of the realm, were put in
writing and certainly published?"
The fact that, in that dark age, so many of the principles of
natural equity, as those then embraced in the Common Law,
should have been so uniformly recognized and enforced by juries,
as to have become established by general consent as "the law
of the land;" and the further fact that this "law of the land" was
held so sacred that even the king could not lawfully infringe or
alter it, but was required to swear to maintain it, are beautiful
and impressive illustrations of the troth that men's minds, even
in the comparative infancy of other knowledge, have clear and
coincident ideas of the elementary principles, and the paramount
obligation, of justice.
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