A long line of sinister precedents crowd
unbidden upon the mind. The Court of King's Bench, when it held Hampden
to be liable for the Ship Money, draped the scaffold for Charles I. The
Parliament of Paris, when it denounced Turgot's edict touching the
corvee, threw wide the gate by which the aristocracy of France passed to
the guillotine. The ruling of the Superior Court of the Province of
Massachusetts Bay, in the case of the Writs of Assistance, presaged the
American Revolution; and the Dred Scott decision was the prelude to the
Civil War.
The capital essential of justice is that, under like conditions, all
should fare alike. The magistrate should be no respecter of persons. The
vice of our system of judicial dispensation is that it discriminates
among suitors in proportion to their power of resistance. This is so
because, under adequate pressure, our courts yield along the path of
least resistance. I should not suppose that any man could calmly turn
over the pages of the recent volumes of the reports of the Supreme Court
of the United States and not rise from the perusal convinced that the
rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, do not receive a common
measure of justice before that judgment seat.
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