whatever is doubtful is decisively certain against the corporation. . . . "The doctrine is maintained by the Supreme Court of the United States, and in many States of the Union. Even in England the justice and necessity of it are universally acknowledged and acted upon. The lawyer who is not already fa miliar with the numerous authorities upon it, to be found in every book of reports, will probably never become so; and the citizen who does not believe it to be a most salutary feature in our jurisprudence would hardly be convinced though one rose from the dead." This has remained the law of Pennsyl vania; and though some text-writers outside the State have impugned the steadfastness of the higher court in adhering to this prin ciple, in so late a case as Groff et al. v. Bird in Hand Turnpike Co., 1889, 24 W. N. C. 424, the court — a divided court, however — denied the right of a turnpike company, chartered generally to build a toll-road be tween two points, to appropriate for its pur poses the bed of an old free public highway running from one of these termini to the other. To very few men, — such are the vicissi tudes of the legal profession, — after having attained eminence on the bench is it given to achieve a later career in politics, in the active practice of law, and in controversial writing, such as attended Judge Black after he went into the Cabinet. Although always a devoted friend of Mr. Buchanan, a sup porter of his leadership in the party, and conspicuously the fittest man in Pennsyl vania for the head of the law department in the administration forming in 1857, it would have been no disappointment to Judge Black had he not been invited to a seat in it. Indeed, he had entirely dismissed all idea of it until again the irreconcilable differences of opposing factions induced the President to offer him the place of Attorney-General. He accepted it because it was strictly in the line of his profession. From the outset he took a leading place in the group of remarkably able men whom Mr. Buchanan called about him. The unhappy events which marked
the opening of the Civil War have obscured to the superficial student much of the merit of that administration; but no one familiar with the history of the attorney-general's office at Washington will dispute that its incumbent never grappled with cases of so great magnitude and of more tremen dous importance than those with which At torney-General Black had to deal, known as the " California land claims." Pretended Mexican grants — nearly all fabrications and utterly bogus, covering tens of thousands of square miles of California territory, embrac ing most of the cities of San Francisco and Sacramento, and numerous important towns, and nearly all the sites then or subsequently occupied by government stations — had been confirmed by the Land Commissioners and passed the lower federal courts, to be finally defeated in the United States Supreme Court. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of property saved to the government and to the settlers under its grants fairly rank this with the most important litigation ever determined in any court of the world. Attorney-General Black's unremitting per sonal attention to it crowned his official career with the most signal success. How the Buchanan Cabinet was disrupted; Judge Black's succession to Mr. Cass as Secretary of State; his own selection for Attorney-General of Stanton, whom he had associated with him as assistant, and for whom such a wide career subsequently opened; and the troubles of the three months immediately preceding Mr. Lin coln's inauguration, — all belong to the po litical history of the country, and in less degree concern this reference to Judge Black's career as a lawyer. But when the history of that period comes to be written in candor and fairness, and when Judge Black's counsel to his chief is studied in the light of constitutional law, it will be found there was no stauncher friend of the Union and no more aggressive defender of the just rights of the general government than Jeremiah S. Black.
