The Early Jurisprudence of New Hampshire.

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE

N. H. HISTORICAL SOCIETY,

JUNE 13, 1883.

BY JOHN M. SHIRLEY, ESQ.

Concord, N. H.:

PRINTED BY THE REPUBLICAN PRESS ASSOCIATION.

1885.

ADDRESS.

History is photography applied to human affairs. Imperfection in material, or lack of care and skill in the artist, may mar or spoil the work. Human bones wired together-the grinning skeleton in some surgical museum-are not the divine creation; but when clothed with flesh and blood, nerve and muscle, and endowed with the spirit which gives action, color, and tone, we recognize the creative individuality, the living man. The cold words of the statutes alone no more constitute the law of the land, than the articulated skeleton the living soul. They must be clothed with the interpretation given by the courts, to which must be added the law of custom, which constitutes four fifths of all the law we have, and which, like the air we breathe, animates and protects us in our homes, in our social gatherings, in our business relations, and in our private life. The spirit which pervades this great body of statutory and customary law, and in which it is administered, is as natural and vitalizing in jurisprudence as in the human animal.

Motion is the law of life; inertia, of decay and death.

There are zest, health, and pleasure in the cooling draughts from the mountain spring, but poison and fever in the stagnant waters of that "river of death," the shaded Yazoo.

Between life and death there is an eternal struggle for the mastery. This is the result of a universal law. It pervades alike jurisprudence, the human form, and that infinity of star-lit worlds, in comparison with which our own solar system is but a grain of sand upon the shore of the great ocean of infinite space.

There are many peculiarities in the jurisprudence of this state. These in general are the result of her early history. These differences would have been more marked had those who for a century made and administered our laws known more of that history. Much that is now known was a sealed book to them. The chief-justices who gave color and form to so much of our legislation as well as our folk-lore law and law of custom, 151717

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