The most formidable rival and opponent of Lord Chatham was William Murray, known in history as Lord Mansfield. In point of native talent it would not be easy to determine which had the advantage; but it is generally conceded that Mansfield’s mind was the more carefully trained, and that his memory was the more fully enriched with the stores of knowledge. He was preËminently a lawyer and a lover of the classics; but Lord Campbell speaks of his familiarity with modern history as “astounding and even appalling, for it produces a painful consciousness of inferiority, and creates remorse for time misspent.” His career is one of the most extraordinary examples in English history of an unquestioning acceptance of the stern conditions of the highest success. Mansfield’s education was characterized by a phenominal devotion to some of the severer kinds of intellectual drudgery. Though he was fourth son of Lord Stormont and brother of Lord Dunbar, the Secretary of the Pretender, he seems from the first to have been fully conscious that he must rely for distinction upon his own efforts alone. When he was but fourteen he had become so familiar with the Latin language that he wrote and spoke it “with accuracy and ease,” and in after-life he declared that there was not one of the orations of Cicero which he had not, while at Oxford, written into English, and after an interval, according to the best of his ability, re-translated into Latin. Leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-two he was entered as a student of law at Lincoln’s Inn in 1727. Lord Campbell says of him: “When he was admitted to the bar in 1730, he had made himself acquainted not only with the international law, but with the codes of all the most civilized nations, ancient and modern; he was an elegant classical scholar; he was thoroughly imbued with the literature of his own country; he had profoundly studied our mixed constitution; he had a sincere desire to be of service to his country; and he was animated by a noble aspiration after honorable fame.”

The family of Murray was one of those Scotch families upon whom a peerage was bestowed by James I. It is not very singular therefore that Lord Stormont, the representative of the family, in the eighteenth century, should, like his predecessors, remain true to the Stuarts and the Pretender. William, the fourth son, grew up in the traditional political beliefs of his ancestors. While Pitt, therefore, was a Whig, Murray was a High Tory. In manner they were as different as in politics. Pitt was ardent and imperious, Murray was cool and circumspect. Pitt strove to overwhelm, but Murray strove to convince. Though Pitt was the great master of declamatory invective, Murray was vastly his superior in all the qualities that go to make up a great debater. The immediate influence of Pitt’s speeches was far more overwhelming, but the qualities of Murray’s argument were more persuasive and more permanent in their influence. Pitt entered the House of Commons in 1735 at twenty-six; Murray in 1742 at thirty-seven. During fourteen years therefore, before 1756 they were each the great exponents of the political parties to which they respectively belonged. Murray entered the House of Lords as Chief Justice and with the title of Baron Mansfield in the same year in which Pitt began his great career as Prime Minister. The power of Pitt was in the House of Commons, while that of Murray was in the House of Lords. Pitt’s influence was over the masses, whose devotion was such that “they hugged his footmen and even kissed his horses.” Murray’s power was over the more thoughtful few who in the end directed public opinion and moulded public action.

The character of Murray, like that of his great rival, was not only above reproach, but was remarkable for its stern rejection of every thing that tried to turn him aside from his great purpose. When the Duchess of Marlborough strove to put him under obligations by sending him a retainer of a thousand guineas, he returned nine hundred and ninety-five, with the remark that a retaining fee was never more nor less than five guineas. When Newcastle offered him a pension of £6,000 a year, if he would remain in the House of Commons, instead of taking the Bench, he put the offer aside without a moment’s hesitation, saying: “What merit have I, that you should lay on this country, for which so little is done with spirit, the additional burden of £6,000 a year?” He was Lord Chief Justice for nearly thirty-two years. Though he probably did more to strengthen the cause of the mother country against the colonies than any other one man, yet his great services have been no less generously acknowledged in America than in England. It was Mr. Justice Story who said: “England and America, and the civilized world, lie under the deepest obligations to him. Wherever commerce shall extend its social influences; wherever justice shall be administered by enlightened and liberal rules; wherever contracts shall be expounded upon the eternal principles of right and wrong; wherever moral delicacy and judicial refinement shall be infused into the municipal code, at once to persuade men to be honest and to keep them so; wherever the intercourse of mankind shall aim at something more elevated than that grovelling spirit of barter, in which meanness, and avarice, and fraud strive for the mastery over ignorance, credulity, and folly, the name of Lord Mansfield will be held in reverence by the good and the wise, by the honest merchant, the enlightened lawyer, the just statesman, and the conscientious judge. The proudest monument of his fame is in the volumes of Burrow, and Cowper, and Douglas, which we may fondly hope will endure as long as the language in which they are written shall continue to instruct mankind. His judgments should not be merely referred to and read on the spur of particular occasions, but should be studied as models of juridical reasoning and eloquence.”

When the matter of repealing the Stamp Act came before Parliament, the question turned, as we have already observed, chiefly on the subject of the clause declaring the right of Parliament to levy the tax. While Chatham arrayed all his powers against the right, Mansfield was its most strenuous supporter. His speech on the subject is of great importance to the American student, because it is by far the most able and plausible ever delivered in support of the British policy. It is avowedly directed to the question of right, not at all to the question of expediency. Lord Campbell, although inclined to the doctrines of the Whigs, refers to the speech as one of arguments to which he “has never been able to find an answer.” The position of Mansfield undoubtedly had a very great influence in determining and strengthening the policy of the King and of the ministry. The speech was corrected for the press by the orator’s own hand, and may be regarded as authentic.