William Sampson. for our free institutions, and that it was the attempt of George the Third and his ministers to deprive the colonies of rights and liberties which they insisted — and justly — were se cured to them by the common law, that led to the War of Independence and the final separation of the colonies from Great Britain. How limited the author's know ledge of it was as a whole will appear by a single passage in which he says that Blackstone, with all his eloquence and grace, could not make that a science which was reducible to no fixed rules or general principles; but the more, he says, ' as the sunny rays of his bright genius fell upon it, the more its grotesque forms became defined; the more they proved to be the wild result of chance and rude convulsions '; and delivered other derogatory opinions of it, with that highest of all confidence, the confidence of ignorance. The address however produced an effect. The editor of a weekly paper at the time declared that it electrified the public mind. It was made the subject of an article in the ' North American Review,' was noticed in England and in France, and may be re garded as the beginning of the movement in this State that led within a decade thereafter to the enactment of the Revised Statutes. What it urged was felt to be necessary — a thorough revision and reconstruction of the entire system then existing in this State; and Sampson kept up the agitation for it by speeches at public dinners, and by inserting in the newspapers articles written by himself, and letters sent to or received from promi nent men on the subject; the general effect of which was to bring the common law into great disrepute in the State, especially among those lawyers who knew the least about it," etc. Hoffman, in his " Legal Study," says that "Sampson may justly be regarded as the great promoter of all the legal amendments, the codes, and consolidations that have so far taken place among us. His invectives, how ever, against the common law were often injudicious and indiscriminately severe."
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With deference to such eminent authorities, I must say, that although his invective is severe, I do not discover that it is ever launched at anything good or even endurable, but on the contrary it seems to be aimed at utter abominations, barbarisms, and supersti tions, which no lawyer of this day would dream of defending. It may be that he did not praise what was good in that law; that was not his purpose; but this is no ground for saying that his censure was injudicious. That adjective would not apply to denuncia tion of Baal or Moloch, and the things that Sampson reprehended were not much better. One might as well censure Luther for not having lauded the Catholic church for the good things in its religion, when his mis sion was to root out the bad. It is also evident that the things for which the common law has been so much praised are not legal, but are political. The four principal bases of modern freedom, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and the inviolability of property from public seizure, except by due process of law, and representation of the taxed, are political rather than legal measures. That which Sampson aimed his shafts at was the custom ary common law, pertaining to private rights, the faults of which were numerous and glar ing. Sampson was an agitator, a reformer and a radical, and if his spirit takes note of earthly affairs, it must be soothed by the dis appearance of the common law from England as fast as statute-makers can accomplish it, and by the abolition of many of its absurdities in his own State. I have read the address in question, and extracted the following, as apparently the very first words favoring codification uttered in New York : — "If the experiment had never before been made of a judicial code, substituted in the place of antiquarian legends, usages and customs, we might fear to engage in an untried and hazardous undertaking. If no attempt had ever yet been made to reduce to a body of written reason the scattered fragments of a nation's laws or usages,
