by time or consecrated by habit, will be preserved and reënacted. Only that which is hurtful, unsuitable, or obsolete, will be laid aside, as it ought, no matter how long it may have lasted, or how strong become.

To the young men of this generation, more than any other that have ever lived, to you who are now going forth from study into professional life, the great task is committed of reforming and establishing the law. You are now enrolled in that profesion upon which, more than any other, rest the functions of government and the preservation of social order. You stand in that great congregation, where also stand the most illustrious men of the past and present ages. Demosthenes, Eschines, Ulpian, Cicero, Daguessau, Bacon, Mansfield, and our own Marshall, Kent, and Story, are your professional brethren. To be worthy to stand in such presence, to be influenced by such examples, to catch a portion of their spirit, are distinctions in themselves.

You stand, moreover, in the very portals of a new time. The world is soon to take its impulses from this side of the ocean. The language we speak, the institutions in which we participate, are to spread with our dominion

"From the world's girdle to the frozen pole "

and beyond our dominion to remote islands and continents. Whence shall come the lawgiver of the new time? From our own soil, I would fain hope and believe. The materials are at hand, and the time is propitious. A new people, grown suddenly to the strength and civilization of the oldest and mightiest, with laws for the most part borrowed, finds that they need to be reëxamined, simplified, and reconstructed. The task is great, the object is greater, and the reward is ample. Let us, then, be up and doing, that we may have the merit and the satisfaction of having accomplished something toward it, before we rest from our labors.

MAGNITUDE AND IMPORTANCE OF LEGAL

SCIENCE.

Address at the opening of the Law School of the University of Chicago, September 21, 1859.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: Twenty years ago there was depending in the Supreme Court of the United States a suit respecting the ownership of a tract of land on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. The parties in interest were, the Government of the United States on one side, and an Indian trader on the other. The controversy attracted much attention. It was debated with earnestness and ability, but the law was with the Government, and the judgment of the Court confirmed its claim. Thereupon the lands came into market, and the city of Chicago now covers them with railroad-stations, warehouses, and dwellings. That tide which feels no ebb, that stream of people, which moves with the sun, westward, and which, first heard in murmurs on the eastern horizon, rises higher and louder, till it swells like the ocean, has passed over this shore, and is now breaking and dashing a thousand miles farther west. Here and around this tract of prairie, for which the Indian trader contended with the Government less than a quarter of a century ago, the stream has left a populous and opulent city, rivaling in magnificence the oldest seats of government and commerce.

It seems but a graceful recognition of the benefits which Chicago received from that righteous judgment that she should now, in the fullness of her prosperity, found a school devoted to legal science. That, however, is the least of the reasons for the establishment of this institution. The magnitude and importance of the science, the consequent necessity for its highest culture, the usefulness of a school above all other means of learning, the situation of Chicago, its commerce and influence, and therefore its fitness as the place of such a school, are all but so many reasons for its establishment. Yours is the chief city of a great and flourishing State, and it has a position dominant over all the West.

In the Mississippi Valley, this marvelous region of abundance, there are few radiating points, and this is one of them. Whatever light is here kindled, shines through township and village, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains. This is not only a mart of commerce, but a workshop of the mind. You send your ships over these lakes even to the outer sea; you dispatch in different directions daily and nightly trains of heavily-laden cars; but you can send abroad richer things than these the products of your mind and the influence of your example.

This school, like the university of which it forms a department, owes its establishment chiefly to the liberality and foresight of citizens of Chicago. A right noble thing was it to found and endow them. Neither the possession of office, even the most exalted, nor the fame of statesmanship, however truly won, will give more certain satisfaction hereafter than the consciousness of having been their founder, or benefactor. For are not the cultivation and advancement of learning, the diffusion of it among men, and the promotion of a higher culture, more rational objects of ambition than wealth or power? And, however large may be a city, however beautiful its streets, and however great its traffic, there is no crown which it can wear so truly light and graceful as a seat of learning, with ample means of knowledge, with doors open to all who will receive it, where all the sciences are cultivated and all the arts can look for assistance.

This is not, however, the occasion to discourse of the value of the sciences or arts in general. We are to-day occupied with one of the sciences. And, even in discoursing of this, I must confine myself to a particular view of it, lest I should weary you. There are undoubtedly several topics, which might properly be considered, in connection with the establishment of this school-as, for example, its relations to the public, to the university and to its own pupils, or the most advisable course of study; but I shall only ask you to consider with me now the magnitude and importance of legal science. And though all knowledge has value, and all the arts their uses, yet, as there are differences in value as in use, I hope to show you that, of all the sciences and all the arts, not one can

be named greater in magnitude or importance than the science for which this school, as a permanent department of your university, is now founded-the science of the law.

Law is a rule of property and of conduct prescribed by the sovereign power of a state. The science of the law embraces, therefore, all the rules recognized and enforced by the state, of all the property and of all the conduct of men in all their relations, public and private. Wherever there appears material capable of appropriation, whether it be solid earth or flowing water, whether it be the product of the soil or the workmanship of man's hand, there comes the law, and gives you the rule by which you may take it, use it, transfer it. Wherever there is a community, wherever there is a family, wherever there is a man, the law prescribes the rights, the duties, the relations. No engagement can be entered into, no work undertaken, no journey made, but with the law in view. No man walks abroad in the morning, or lies down to sleep at night, or takes his bride to the altar, or lays his child in the cradle, but under the law's protection. This science, therefore, is equal in duration with history, in extent with all the affairs of

men.

We can measure it best by tracing its progress. When men dwelt in tents and led a pastoral life, their laws might have been compressed in a few pages. They had, of course, some part of our law of personal rights, the law of succession, and of boundaries between the occupiers of adjoining pastures. This was the condition of the race in the primitive ages, and is even yet the condition of some parts of it. The Laplander in the North, the Bedouin in the South, the nomadic tribes which roam over Central Asia, our American Indians, and the Southern Africans, are in this condition. The Bedouin encamps upon the edge of the sand, or along the declivities of the mountains, his tents, his flocks, and herds, his scanty list of clothing and utensils being his only wealth. When he has exhausted one spot he removes to another, and if he is disturbed he flies to the desert. Nevertheless, he is not without the pale of the law. He recognizes in many things more than the right of the strongest. His personal relations to his wife, his children, and his neighbors are subjects of regulation, and when

he dies his effects are parted according to rule among his kin

dred.

The next stage in the civilization of the race was the fixed habitation and the cultivation of the soil; and this brought with it the next stage in the development of the legal system -the law of land and of permanent structures-a department which, though it teaches of the most permanent of earthly things, has not partaken of their permanence, but has fluctuated with political condition. The distribution of the land has determined the policy and the fate of governments, and these in their turn have encouraged the aggregation or subdivision of estates, as they inclined to aristocratic or democratic institutions.

We cling, nevertheless, to the solid earth as we cling to no other possession. To possess land, to own an estate, to found a family, and to make for it an ancestral home, are objects of ambition almost universal. We seem to ourselves to be more firmly fixed when we are anchored in the soil. Where a man can stand beneath an ample roof and look over broad meadows and corn-fields all his own, watch the reapers of his harvests, and the cattle in his pastures, he feels more stable in his fortunes, and fancies himself more abiding on the earth, than if his wealth were in ships or factories. Then, the pleasures of agriculture are the most favorable to a serene spirit and a happy life. The fair, which has been so lately held in this city, and of which I hear so much, which so many thousands attended, and where the wealth of your soil was marvelously displayed, bears witness to the interest excited in this pursuit. And, notwithstanding the enormous increase of personal property in our modern society, the larger portion of man's wealth is still in the land. In the State of New York, the most commercial of our States, the assessed value of real property the last year was over a thousand millions of dollars, while that of personal property was but three hundred and sixty-seven millions; and even in its metropolitan city, where there is the largest aggregation of personal property, its assessed value was only one hundred and sixty-two millions, while that of real property was three hundred and sixty-eight millions.

For these reasons, the law, which regulates the possession,