Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 190]

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182 its votaries and practitioners profess; if courts were rightly administered, and judges were learned and prudent, as we have a right to expect; if the public were satisfied of these things so as to put confidence.in the conclusions reached—Caesar being honorable and honored—the right would^be known to be as clearly right when decided by the judge of a nisi prias court, as when it has been approved by a series of appeals which has ended before the full-robed nine who sit at Washington. What effect would be produced upon justice and the uncertainty of the law. if after some number, say fifty, or an hundred, or-five hundred, of the decisions of a given judge had been reversed by courts of higher resort, that judge should thereupon at once and finally be removed from the bench, and thus the farther travesty of justice by his malpractice be prevented? Do not infer that I refer to the defects of the administration of justice as common. I would arrange in some way to make them less possible. For in these respects the world does more. Wrongs in action, defects in judgments, differences and disputes, as well between nations as between persons, are more and more frequently adjusted and settle*! by lawful process. It was a long step towards the era in which right, not might, shall redress wrong, when the two foremost nations of the world agreed to refer their differences to arbitration; and when, the decision being rendered, the defeated party did so render dues unto Caesar as to pay the award of the arbitrators without farther contention. So, too, is it an omen of good when a nation's wrongs, ancient, aggravated, and grievous, find chance and scope for redress in the enactments of a legislative body. I know not, my friends, how the events and debates now progressing in the Parliament of England appear to you, but I have watched them with exceeding interest, and with earnest hope, growing daily into a confident expectation that, if not at once, they will at no distant date bring about a reasonable and fair solution of the questions which have so long been discussed concerning the Irish people, and a joyous release from their accumulated wrongs. I have been astonished, as I think you must have been, at the wonderful acumen, fertility of resource, and firmness of purpose which Mr. Gladstone has exhibited. I have admired the wisdom with which he has tempered the larger purposes which he surely must have cherished, to meet conditions which could not be changed, and prejudices which could not be removed. To me he shows a notable example of that good sense which thankfully accepts that which is within his reach, and bides the time when something better may be secured. English conservatism is strong, as it has a right to be. Her ancient forms of jurisprudence and of parliamentary government are as venerable as her forests or her cathedrals, yet the reforms which Mr. Gladstone has aided in establishing during the fifty-four years since in 1832 he first entered Parliament, and the obstacles, mosscovered and hoary with age and precedent, which during that time have been removed from the way of England's progress, are too numerous to be here rehearsed, and ought to be too many to be forgotten. They include the repeal of the corn laws; the disestablishment of the Irish church; the abolishment of purchase of pro-