It is plain that such a state of things has the utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power.

But it threw a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong.

The increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped the efforts of the law.

Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a wrong which sprang from modern circumstances.

Sometimes the very pedantry and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest injustice.
[Sidenote: Equitable Jurisdiction] It was the consciousness of this that made men cling even from the first moment of the independent existence of these courts to the judicial power which still remained inherent in the Crown itself.