4.-Pension Laws, Forms, Instructions, &c., &c., 5.-Laws, Regulations, and Decisions concerning the purchase and use of Internal revenue Stamps, (as issued by the Department CHAPTER I. WHAT IS LAW? I PROPOSE to make this chapter mainly introductory; to state and discuss elementary principles, and definitions, and sources of general law. And first, I think we may profitably inquire, "What is Law?" It has been variously defined. In its most general sense it signifies "a rule of action,”—all kinds of action, whether animate or inanimate, rational or irrational. In its more confined sense, law denotes the rule, "not of actions in general, but of human actions or conduct." I would define "municipal law," simply as a rule of conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a State. Judge Swift of Connecticut, defines what he calls "civil law" to be, "a rule of human action adopted by mankind in a state of society, or prescribed by the supreme power of the government, requiring a course of conduct, not repugnant to morality or religion, productive of the greatest political happiness, and prohibiting actions contrary thereto, and which is enforced by the sanction of pains and penalties." Burke says, "law is beneficence acting by rule," which seems to be a more abstract statement of the same idea which Judge Swift has elaborated. Hooker, in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," says with some poetic fervor, if not with practical accuracy, "the voice of law is the harmony of the world, all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power." 66 The greatest of the ancient sages, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero expressed the same idea, and Plato claimed that the essence of freedom" consisted in the "supremacy of law over personal will, whether it be the will of one, of the few, or of the many." |