been
worse chancellors." "But an age of comparative freedom and refinement
has rarely exhibited one who so ill understood, or at least so ill
discharged, the functions of a statesman and legislator."

I will enrich this part of my argument with an example of the opinions
of this Judge, which would endear him to the present administration
in America, and entitle him to a high place among southern
politicians. In 1788 a bill was brought into Parliament to mitigate
the horrors of the African slave-trade. The Lord Chancellor, Thurlow,
opposed it and said:--

"It appears that the French have offered premiums to
encourage the African [slave] trade, and that they have
succeeded. The natural presumption therefore is, that _we
ought to do the same_. For my part, my Lords, I have no
scruple to say that if the 'five days' fit of philanthropy'
[the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just
sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together,
were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to
me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject
piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to
be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps,
by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by
their own authority, to proceed at once to a 'total and
immediate abolition of the trade.' One witness has come to
your Lordship's bar with a face of woe--his eyes full of
tears, and his countenance fraught with horror, and said,
'_My Lords, I am ruined if you pass this bill! I have risked
L30,000 on the trade this year! It is all I have been able
to gain by my industry, and if I lose it I must go to the
hospital!_' I desire of you to think of such things, my
Lords, in your _humane phrensy, and to show some humanity to
the whites as well as to the negroes_."[44]

[Footnote 44: 5 Campbell, 460; 27 Parl. Hist. 638.]

One measure of tyranny in the hands of such Judges is Constructive
Crime, a crime which the revengeful, or the purchased judge distils
out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of
the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn
out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the
sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be
fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxic