exchange. The adjustment of the relations of labor and of capital which represents the accumulated result of labor, is to be referred to it. It is to regulate the division of labor, and that which is of higher value, the union and coöperation of labor, and that which is of still higher value, it is to maintain the freedom of labor.

The commonwealth has, in connection with the economic interests and laws of society, the department of social statics. The enactment of sanitary laws and regulations, and the foundation of sanitary institutions, belongs to it. It is to take necessary measures for the protection of health, and to secure society against whatever may be a public nuisance or a public peril.1

The commonwealth is formed in the institution and maintenance of civil rights. The individuals composing it are private persons, and as such they are comprehended by it; they have each their end in the necessary relations of life to secure, and the security of their private interests is the necessary end for which the commonwealth exists. The individual, therefore, may require the security of his necessary rights from the commonwealth, and the commonwealth may require from each that he also hold these rights for others secure. There is, therefore, to be established through it the protection of each in his necessary rights and his necessary avocation, with no undue hindrance or unequal restriction.

The commonwealth is instituted in the maintenance of justice in the necessary relations of life, or civil justice. This is the law which is formative of its whole organization, and is defined in a jural system. Justice is to be recognized as necessarily involved in the organization of society, and is to be affirmed as law, and to be adminis

1 The establishment of a quarantine and quarantine regulations, thus falls naturally within its object, but this ought not to be regarded solely as the concern of a separate commonwealth, and is not subject to internal administration. Its institution in the harbor of New York, is of no more consequence to the people of the commonwealth than to the adjacent territory.

tered between man and man. Its violation is to be set forth as crime, and the penalties incurred by crime are to be defined and imposed. Since justice in the commonwealth or civil justice is apprehended as existent in the necessary relations of life, it is to be maintained through its whole extent for all men, and there is to be the recognition of the equality of all men before the law. It is not to assume a different principle of action for different sorts and conditions of men. It is to assert a justice which is impartial, or it becomes itself an organized injustice. It is to establish justice in the authority of law, and to judge the infraction of law as crime. It is to maintain justice for every man; and private revenge is forbidden as the rude justice of an unorganized and barbaric state. The execution of justice is to be regarded as the necessary condition of the commonwealth through its whole extent, and its whole power is to act in its ultimate enforcement. It is to be the guardian of every individual. The object,

in the increase of the commonwealth, to be steadily regarded, is that the process of justice shall not be neutralized through old and imperfect judicial organizations, where the abuses tend only to the emolument of a special and conservative profession, as in the commonwealth of Connecticut; and that it shall not become entangled in intricate formalities, to become what Cromwell called the law-system of his age, "a tortuous and ungodly jungle;" nor that it shall affect, beyond the necessity of scientific precision, a phraseology unknown to the people; nor that justice shall be made so costly that any shall be debarred from access to it. Justice is to be open and free to all. It should be the same for all, and thus in the apprehension of crime no special or private rewards should be allowed, but it should be held as the office of the state; and no officer of the state nor of its police, should be allowed to receive a tender of reward from private persons, nor should any gift be made to justice. A system of

private rewards gives to wealth and power a special security, which is not open to all, nor promotive of the security of the whole, and is but a slight advance from a system of private revenge. The commonwealth is to bring crime to the light, and its object is to protect rights and not criminals. The fair trial of all charges is to be had, and the evidence of all, the plaintiff and defendant alike, is to be received that all may be known. The object is to make the conviction of crime sure and the punishment inevitable, and to determine the actual injury and the actual degree of guilt. The course of law thus is not to be merely formal and mechanical, as in an imperial code, but it is to regard the varying aspects of human action and the varying conditions of human life. It is to take into account the age and circumstance and mental condition, and all which may be exculpatory in them, and to regard crimes to which different degrees of guilt attach, and for which there must be corresponding degrees in the punishment imposed. Thus the law, instead of an unvarying and mechanical application, presumes the deliberation of those before whom trial is had, and the judgment of a judge.

The commonwealth has the institution of its procedure in the common law. This is its exclusive province. It is this law which has been instituted in the ascertainment of the justice involved in the necessary relations of men. It recognizes a solid justice existent in the development of these relations. It is shaped in the jural definition of these relations. It acknowledges, therefore, as a prescriptive right, that which by long continuance has been wrought in the use and wont of men. It holds the right of ways which are open to all alike, and fair to all, and have been long trodden by the steps of men. It is this recognition of justice as existent in the necessary relations of men, which is the precedent of the common law, and the condition of its legal positivism. It is not the tradition of any code nor commandment, however ancient.

The principles to be regarded in the constitution of the commonwealth are those which define its unity and its scope. The unity of the commonwealth is that of the unitary organization of justice. Its authority is to have within itself no formal restriction and no sectional limitation. It is as a crime against the whole that the violation of its law is to be regarded and punished. The denial of the unity of the organization of the commonwealth was the ground of opposition to the important legislation of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in the succession of crimes and outbreaks of violence in Schuylkill County in 1867, and also to a system of metropolitan police in certain separate districts. But the commonwealth fails of its end when crime is allowed to remain unpunished, or rights become insecure through defect in its organization. There is no sectional right in the outlawry of a certain locality, to preclude the action of the commonwealth through its whole extent.

The scope of the commonwealth has also no restriction in the institution of civil rights, and the determination of the whole civil order is within its sphere. The reason and the right of the legislation of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which modified the whole tenure of property, and was so great an advance in establishing the freedom of property, placing real property upon the same basis in certain respects as personal property, was opposed with the argument, not that the act was in itself unjust, but that it was beyond the scope of the commonwealth. But this rests in a deficient apprehension of the commonwealth, for in the normal civil order and civil administration, there is no formal limit to its action.

The territorial extent of the commonwealth is commonly shaped by some circumstance, or some consideration of civil administration. It conforms mainly to the content of the commonwealth, and when once established it is to be 1 Price Act, April 18, 1853.

held stably, as if it were itself bottomed in the common law, and as describing old and established interests which have grown up and repose in it.

The nation in its civil organization may constitute a single commonwealth, or it may be divided into many and separate commonwealths, and these may increase in number, with the extension of the national domain, and the change and growth of population.

The conception of the commonwealth, as it has been represented in political science, has had its precedent in the slow advance of civilization. Its organization is not new nor strange, nor did it come forth at once complete in all its powers in the beginning of the American state. The form may be discerned in its germ in the first unfolding of the civilization of the Teuton, and may be traced in the succeeding institutions of our ancestors as they emerge from the shadows of German forests. It appears in the structure of the constitution of England, in the organization of counties for civil administration and the management of local and special concerns, while embraced in the kingdom, and subject to the Crown and the Parliament, in whom is the determination of the political whole. It appears in the distinction of the Hundred, and however rude and imperfect may have been the form of this, and however widely writers may differ in defining its character and limitations, they all agree in the reference to it of the transaction of judicial, and the management of local concerns; its primary object is that of civil administration. There is, in the "Lives of the Chief Justices," an illustration of the manner in which this distinction was guarded. The writer says of the office of Chief Justiciar, as introduced by William the Conqueror from Normandy, "The functions of such an office would have ill accorded with the notions of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, who had a great antipathy to centralization, and prided themselves upon