own time, will not only efface most of the distinctions between law and equity, but will completely sweep away the common law so far as its forms of proceeding are concerned, and in so doing work a change in the administration of justice, far more complete than was ever before effected in so short a period. Our example and influence are already making themselves felt in England; and the alterations there, though perhaps they will be more cautiously made, bid fair to be not much less sweeping.
Convinced, as I have long been, that these changes-although attended by the evils which always wait upon great and sudden modifications of existing arrangements, evils aggravated in this case in our country by our tendency to act rather with energy and vigor than with caution and deliberation-still, that these changes will finally establish our jurisprudence on a basis more intelligible, more harmonious, more beneficial, I cannot in any sense regret their introduction.
For the time being, however, in regard to the order and arrangement of this work, I have felt the full inconvenience resulting from the present chaotic state of our procedure. I have endeavored to avoid it as far as possible by keeping steadily in view what is manifestly the inevitable result of the experiments now going on, viz.; the final and total abrogation of the forms of the common law both in England and America. When that end is at length attained, and when the application for redress shall be made to depend solely on the right, then, and not till then, it will be easy to classify and arrange the rules governing the measure of relief in a manner that shall be at once legal and logical; that shall satisfy the technical demands of the mere practitioner, and at the same time gratify that love of reason and justice which animates the mind of him. who desires to find something in the law besides a mere collection of abstract and arbitrary rules.