What the Chief
Justice had it at heart to do was to surrender a fundamental principle,
and yet to appear to make no surrender at all. Hence, he prepared his
preliminary and extra-judicial essay on the human reason, of whose
precise meaning, I must admit, I still, after many perusals, have grave
doubts. I sometimes suspect that the Chief Justice did not wish to be
too explicit. So far as I comprehend the Chief Justice, his chain of
reasoning amounted to something like this: It was true, he observed,
that for fifteen years the Supreme Court had rejected the evidence of
reasonableness which he admitted, and had insisted upon a general
principle which he might be supposed to renounce, but this apparent
discrepancy involved no contradiction. It was only a progression in
thought. For, he continued, the judges who, on various previous
occasions, sustained that general principle, must have reached their
conclusions by the light of reason; to-day we reach a contrary
conclusion, but we also do so by the light of reason; therefore, as all
these decisions are guided by the light of reason they fundamentally
coincide, however much superficially they may seem to differ.
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