Early in the last century (I8o4), Mr. Smith, an eminent lawyer of Woodbury, Connecticut, in an eloquent and impressive argument before the Supreme Court of Errors' indignantly disputed the proposition of Lord Mansfield stated in Corbett v. Poelnitz. 3 "That as the times alter, new customs and new manners arise, and new exceptions and applications of the rules of law must be made." Inveighing against the sins of England, he exclaims: "And, to be sure, manners have there led the law and law the manners, till all barriers are thrown down. And are we to go on in their tracks, not by degrees, but to take at once the last step which corruption has there introduced and bury in oblivion the principle that a feme covert has no separate existence ?"4 Counsel had never heard in Connecticut of exceptions to the marriage contract so that the wife need not lose her independence, or of relatives giving property to married women to their separate use; and he warmly insisted "that the generosity of our females has not allowed them to wish to keep their property from those to whom they have not refused their persons." The Supreme Court of Errors, sitting at Hartford, to whom this typical argument was advanced, was composed of Jonathan Trumbull, the governor, Lieutenant Governor John Treadwell and ten assistants, all unknown to fame except Oliver Ellsworth, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, of whom la Rochefoucault-Liancourt, in that most delightful of all works of travel, his Voyage dans les Etats Unis d'Arnrique, thus speaks (he calls him "Elleword," but that is a detail) : "Les Amricains qui passaient avec nous et qui presque fous etaient des jeunes gens n'avaient pas plus degard pour lui que pour 'The substance of this article was contained in an address delivered before the graduating class of the Yale School of Law. 'Dibble v. Hutton (18o4, Conn.) I Day, 22r, 224. ' (178s) 1 T. R. 8. 'One is irresistibly reminded of the address to a jury attributed to Erskineor sometimes to Scarlett, who though bright was not deep-read: "Gentlemen of the jury, the reputation of a cheesemonger in the city of London is like the bloom upon a peach. Breathe on itl-and it is gone for ever." Not the original Jonathan, Washington's "Brother Jonathan" who, beginning as a clergyman, ended up as a judge, but his son.