Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia once remarked that courts of last resort lived by correcting the errors of others and adhering to their own. Nevertheless, they have often, years after formally announcing a certain legal doctrine in one of their opinions, declared it to be unsound, and overruled the case in which it was laid down. They do this, however, with natural and proper reluctance, and never if this doctrine is one affecting private rights of property and has been followed for so long a course of time that it may be considered as a rule on which the people have relied in exchanging values and transferring titles. The public, however, have rights to be regarded as fully as individuals, and if a right of private ownership has been adjudged to exist, which involves a public loss, the precedent thus created might be overruled with less hesitation than one would be determining rights and correlative obligations that were purely private. Thus the North Carolina courts for seventy years held that a public office was the private property of the incumbent. No other courts in the United States took that view, and it has, by a recent decision, been repudiated in North Carolina.[Footnote: Mial _v._ Ellington, 134 North Carolina Reports, 131; 46 Southeastern Reporter, 961; 65 Lawyers' Reports Annotated, 697.] Still more are public interests to be regarded when a question arises as to reversing a decision as to the proper construction of a constitutional provision. If a judicial mistake be made in construing a statute it is easily remedied. The next legislature can amend the law. But a Constitution can only be amended with extreme difficulty and by a slow process. If the court falls into error as to its meaning, the correction must ordinarily come from its own action or not at all. Hence an opinion on a matter of constitutional construction is less to be regarded as a final and conclusive precedent than one rendered on a matter of mere private right. It has been the position of some American statesmen and jurists that judicial decisions on points of constitutional construction were not binding upon the executive or legislative department of the government. President Jackson asserted this with great force in his message to the Senate of July 10, 1832, disapproving the re-charter of the Bank of the United States. He conceded, however, that a judicial precedent may be conclusive when it has received the settled acquiescence of the people and the States. But while such acquiescence may strengthen the authority of a decision, it can hardly be regarded as that which gives it authority. That comes from the fact that it is an exercise of the judicial power of the government in a case for the disposal of which this judicial power has been properly invoked.