W. VEEDER: A CENTURY OF JUDICATURE 751 indissolubility. When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften by mutual accommodation that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands and good wives from the necessity of remaining husbands and wives, for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties which it imposes. If it were once under- stood that upon mutual disgust married persons might be legally separated, many couples, who now pass through the world with mutual comfort, with attention to their offspring and to the moral order of civil society, might have been at this moment living in a state of mutual unkindness, in a state of estrangement from their common offspring, and in a state of the most licentious and unreserved immorality. In this case, as in many others, the happiness of some individuals must be sacrificed to the greater and more general good." But the highest sphere in which he exercised his faculties was the Court of Admiralty, where for a period of thirty years he was rather a law-giver than a judge. Except a few manuscript notes, and occasional references to tradition and personal memory, there were no precedents for his guidance in adjudicating upon the novel cases arising out of the most important war in English history. He was free to be guided by the writers on Roman, canon and international law, and by the historical material with which his wide reading had made him familiar. At the same time the unequalled variety of cases which came before him enabled him to give unity and consistency to a whole department of law. The legal interruption to navigation which both belligerent parties may create against neutrals, the rights of joint captors, cases of unlawful detention and seizure, the force and con- struction of different treaties, the existence of an actual blockade, the condemnation of merchant ships for resisting search, questions of domicile, the extent of the protection of cartel, the extent of territorial claims, the validity of orders in council — these are among the subjects adjudicated by him with such unerring accuracy that, though often appealed from, it is said that not one of his judgments was reversed. Upon many maritime points his judgments are
