A great and growing commerce is carried on upon them between different States and a foreign nation, which is subject to all the incidents and hazards that attend commerce on the ocean. Hostile fleets have encountered on them and prizes been made, and every reason which existed for the grant of admiralty jurisdiction to the general government on the Atlantic seas applies with equal force to the lakes. There is an equal necessity for the instance and for the prize power of the admiralty court to administer international law, and if the one cannot be established neither can the other.... The case of the _Thomas Jefferson_ did not decide any question of property or lay down any rule by which the right of property should be determined.... The rights of property and of parties will be the same by whatever court the law is administered. And as we are convinced that the former decision was founded in error, and that the error, if not corrected, must produce serious public as well as private inconvenience and loss, it becomes our duty not to perpetuate it."[Footnote: The Genesee Chief, 12 Howard's Reports, 443, 451.] But without any change of circumstances, the proper desire of all American courts to keep their common law in harmony with that of the other States is often sufficient to induce the abandonment of a doctrine once distinctly asserted.[Footnote: City of South Bend _v._ Turner, 156 Indiana Reports, 418; 60 Northeastern Reporter, 271.] The consistency of American law as a whole is immeasurably more important than the consistency of the law of any single State. Sometimes a court of last resort treats a doctrine which it had formerly asserted as manifestly unsound and abandons it without stopping to give a reason or even to overrule the decision which first announced it. Illinois for a long generation adopted the rule that if an injury occurred to one man through the concurring negligence of himself and another, but his negligence was slighter than that of the other, he might hold the latter responsible for the damages suffered.[Footnote: Andrews, "American Law," 255, 1027.] It was not a doctrine justified by the common law nor generally held in this country, and in 1894 the Supreme Court of the State refused to recognize it, with little or nothing more than this brief _ipse dixit_: "The doctrine of comparative negligence is no longer the law of this court."[Footnote: Lanark _v._ Dougherty, 153 Illinois Reports, 163; 38 Northeastern Reporter, 892.] Occasionally a case is overruled because it has been forgotten.