enforced by the courts of a free country; that such statutes have no place in the corpus juris of an enlightened and commercial community; that water cannot be legislated to run up hill; that even an act of Parliament cannot stay the slow precession of the equinoxes, nor the activity of Mrs. Partington with her broom beat back the incoming tide; and finally that it is the true function of the legislator to catch the flow and function of affairs, to reflect it in his work, and laying aside his ill-digested theories and speculations of what might, in Utopia, be ideally excellent, to do, in the matter of statute making what he can, and not try to do what he can not.

⁠Chicago.