What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.

History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.