APPENDIX
PORTRAIT OF JUDGE WILLIAM GASTON
PRESENTED TO THE SUPREME COURT ON 14 DECEMBER, 1893
Mr. Fabius H. Bitsbee, addressing the Court, said :
To every loyal North Carolinian, layman or lawyer, it is a cause for
sincere congratulation that the walls of its Supreme Court room are
being rapidly filled with the portraits of the learned and sagacious men
who laid deep the foundations, and wisely built the superstructure of
our jurisprudence.
North Carolina owes an incalculable debt to its judiciary. Beguiled
by pardonable State pride, we are sometimes prone to overestimate the
relative importance of our State in the roll of American Common¬
wealths. But we can make no mistake in asserting the great value of
her contribution to the complex system of American law. In spite of
the fact that the State has never had a large town, that her commerce,
trade and manufactures have been of comparatively small importance,
and that, in consequence, her litigation, for the most part, has been
based upon controversies concerning land or involving small amounts,
yet the influence of her earlier judges is strongly marked in the general
current of American decisions. With the enormous increase in the
population, wealth, trade and industries of the newer States, almost
magical in rapidity of their growth, many of them blessed with learned
and industrious appellate tribunals, it is impossible for the older States
to maintain their comparative influence, although the learning and
character of their judges show no abatement. When we .seek the foun¬
tain-head of the principles now firmly established as the system of
American law, to trace the earlier application of the doctrines
(738) of the English common law to the strange conditions and pe¬
culiar environments of a new republic, or rather new system of
republics, based upon written constitutions, along with New Hamp¬
shire and Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, we find every¬
where marks of the current of North Carolina decisions. There were
no legal pioneers more fearless and conservative than our older judges
in blazing the .pathways through the virgin forests or breaking the un¬
trodden snow in the new fields of judicial inquiry.
At a time when the Supreme Court of North Carolina reached per¬
haps its highest point of influence and usefulness, the honored name of
William Gaston shines bright upon the pages which record its work.
Unlike the large majority of the judges who constituted the Court he had
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