Its movement is constant, sometimes in the wrong direction, it is true, but in the long run generally in the right direction. When law ceases to grow, society ceases to advance. They are all only provisions for carrying out, in the numerous relations of life, the enjoyment of rights of life, liberty, and property, in the liberal acceptation of those terms. And the province of the general body of the law, in its vast elaboration, is only to increase the security, to diminish the interruptions, to improve and extend the enjoyment of these fundamental and indispensable rights. When this is accomplished, the power and province of civil authority are exhausted.
Human law can do no more for man.
All that remains to make life happy and prosperous must come, under Providence, from personal conduct and exertion, for which the field is thus opened and protected. I have been thus elementary, in order to point out as clearly as I can just what it is that the law of the land secures, and to emphasize the distinction between constitutional rights and merely legal rights. The line which divides these two classes of rights is the one which defines and limits the power of the majority. In respect to legal rights, that power is ultimately supreme. If inconvenience, hardship, or injustice result from its exercise, they can only be corrected through the law-making power itself.