concerned. Every important principle which is developed by
litigation is in fact and at bottom the result of more or less
definitely understood views of public policy: most generally,
to be sure, under our practice and traditions the unconscious
result of instinctive preferences and inarticulate convictions,
but none the less traceable to views of public policy in the
last analysis.... The truth is that the law is always
approaching and never reaching consistency. It is forever
adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always
retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet
been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely
consistent only when it ceases to grow.

Courts enter on a dangerous ground when, to justify their action,
they rely on any rule of public policy not stated in Constitution
or statute and unknown to the common law. If such was once the
habit of the English courts, it was because of social conditions
with which they had to deal which no longer exist either in their
country or in ours. It is for the judge to adapt old principles
rather than adopt new ones. What one man thinks is public policy
another, equally clear-headed and well-informed, may not. The
safe course for the judiciary is to rely on the legislature to
declare it, so far as the common law does not. If, however, the
courts of a State are called upon for the first time to declare
what any rule of the common law, governing a past transaction,
is, or at a given time was, in that State, and this be a doubtful
question, the decision virtually calls for the making of a new
rule, though under the form of applying an old one, and that will
be adopted which may be deemed best calculated to do justice in
cases of that particular character.[Footnote: Seery _v._