If the day shall ever come, in the United States, when this mistaken custom of the Babylonians and the ancient Athenians shall be generally established, and the disappointed suitor and political demagogue can gather his associates and bid the judge come down from his judgment seat to answer the excited multitude for the correctness of his judgments, then the safeguards of the Constitution, guaranteed to us by the patriot fathers will be trampled under foot; this will cease to be a Government of law and become a mere aggregation of people, where law is not the rule of life.[70] The statesmen of ancient Greece found that the judge could not be safely tried by political methods, for the elements of personal ambition, favoritism, money interest, envy and divers other equations, were likely to be used in passing upon the qualifications of the judge, when arraigned before the forum of a wrought up public sentiment. Nor would it be different in any other country, under similar conditions. In the days of Hammurabi, when the courts were so much concerned about the trials of those supposed to “weave spells over a man” and his guilt or innocence was determined by his survival of the torrent of the “holy river;” when the standards of justice were such that the surgeon, who was unsuccessful in an operation, lost his hands; when the veterinarian paid for all the stock he could not cure; the builder, or artisan, all damages resulting from a house he had built afterwards falling down. When, in all the relations of life—save that of the royal prerogatives—the test of human action was the exalted ideal of infallibility, then the judge who set aside a judgment was humiliated and disgraced and peremptorily removed from office. All morality was on a par with such ideals of the exalted virtues like justice, and brides were auctioned off by their fathers to the highest bidder and all human action was in keeping with such dark days of superstition and delusion. The behavior of the judge of the time of Cnut, in England, when he was liable to be fined and removed for entering “a false judgment,” was in strict accord with the low standards of justice then obtaining and from this degraded position of the judiciary, to that of the exalted notion of an absolutely independent judiciary, there was the same difference in the quality of justice administered, that obtained between the generally ignorant men selected to parcel out the right, for remuneration, in those dark days and the pure and scholarly jurists, who, for centuries have made the administration of the law, in England, the admiration of the civilized world. The history of the judiciary, in England, has certainly demonstrated the wisdom of an independent judiciary, for no country pays the same high regard to the majesty of the law and in none are the correct ideals in legal standards more nearly approximated, than in England.[71]