But let him
take care how he endangers the safety of that constitution which secures
his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those
who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like the
sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants
are engrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar
of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of
prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which
the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been
enriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very full
share) in bringing to its perfection. The duke of Bedford will stand as
long as prescriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of
property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their
integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of laws, maxims,
principles, or precedents, of the grand revolution. They are secure
against all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes,
digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same,
but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the
laws, on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the
governments of the world. The learned professors of the rights of man
regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all
possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the
possessor and proprietor.
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