[Footnote 3: Hardly less startling an exercise of legislative power by the judiciary, was in the abolition of slavery. The Bill of Rights prefixed to the constitution of Massachusetts, adopted in 1780, asserts, as most of our state constitutions do--substantially copying the Declaration of Independence--"_that all men are born free and equal_, and have certain natural and unalienable rights;" namely, the right of enjoying their lives and liberties, &c. On this, some masters spontaneously yielded freedom to their slaves; others, on its being demanded of them. In 1781, a master who refused, was sued by his slave for a trespass, assault and battery, and false imprisonment; and pleaded, that the plaintiff, being his slave, had no right to sue him. The court held, that slavery was contrary to the first article of the Bill of Rights; and that therefore the plea was bad, and the plaintiff was free. This decision virtually abolished slavery in Massachusetts, without any legislative act for doing so. Some other suits were brought; but in most cases, masters yielded at once. There were then not quite five thousand slaves in the state. Abolition was similarly effected in New Hampshire. It was by legislation in New York, where there were twenty-one thousand slaves, in a whole population of three hundred and forty thousand.] The chief court of Massachusetts has tasked the readers of law-books, as heavily as our's has done. Its decisions fill twenty-seven or twenty-eight octavo volumes--about our number. The supreme court of New York has issued more than thirty; the supreme court at Washington eighteen or twenty; Pennsylvania, Connecticut, South Carolina--but I forbear the appalling list. Every good law library, however, should have at least the five sets first named; and they are as yet but just begun. If the monstrous increase be not checked, what purse can buy, what head can read (much less remember,) nay what room can hold them, a century hence? Already, indeed, we are grievously over-tasked: for besides the thousands of tomes, English and American, now accumulated,[4] it is impossible to keep pace with the daily accessions, poured forth from a hundred manufactories of legal oracles. Some powerful condenser, or another Caliph Omar, is our only hope. The oppressive bulkiness of law-reports is owing partly to the reporters; but more, to the judges--who, apparently more intent on the display of learning and ingenuity, than upon adjusting the rights of the parties, often swell the simple and clear page or two, which the case requires, into a rambling and voluminous disquisition of twenty pages. Nay, not content with _one_ such disquisition in each case, each judge presents his own; and the reporter spreads them all at length in his next volume. I wish that both judges and reporters could be obliged to study, as models of lucid brevity, Yelverton's Reports, and the still more admirable decisions of Chief Justice Tindal, of the