been laid upon him by some courts, a further liability for the negligence of one of his servants in charge of a separate department or branch of business, whereby another of his employees has l>een injured, even though the neglect was not of that character which the master owed in his capacity as master to the servant who was in jured." The errors and obscurity of these two passages arc due to haste and carelessness, but the defects of the sentence which I am about to quote really seem to arise from a lack of education : — "What it [the Southern Pacific Railroad Com pany] agreed to do was to let the Rock Island into such use of the bridge and tracks as it did not need for its own purposes." Here we have in one short sentence two faults of taste, — the use of the inelegant phrase " let into," in the sense of permit, and the abbreviated designation of a rail road company, as "the Rock Island," — and one fault, in the last part of the sen tence, in the employment of words, for it is impossible to speak of "needing" a use. I will add only one more illustration from the Supreme Court reports : — "Under the circumstances, the fact that the plaintiff was an Indian tribe cannot make Fed eral questions of the correct construction of the act, and the bar of the statute of limitation." It would, I think, be impossible to find such sentences as I have now quoted in any but the recent volumes of Supreme Court reports, and I may add that I have taken them from opinions written, not by the senior, but by the junior occupants of the bench. Such carelessness in the use of language by members of what is confess edly the most important and powerful tribunal in the whole world, is inexcusable. In some degree, — perhaps in but a small degree, — it detracts from the dignity of the Court. To those members of the bar who have visited the Capitol, the words "Supreme Court," call up a picture of nine dignified and, for the most part, venerable
men, enthroned in tall armchairs, against a royal background of scarlet hangings, waited upon by obsequious clerks, mes sengers and pages and, perchance, deliver ing opinions which may affect the welfare of the country for generations to come. To see the Supreme Court come in and take their seats, and to hear an opinion read by a justice whose voice and manner satisfy the imagination, would give almost any member of the bar, who was new to Wash ington, an idea of the Court which he had not possessed before. But it is inevitable that most lawyers throughout the length and breadth of the country, should know the Supreme Court only by their pub lished opinions. They know, or imagine, how the members of the Court appear, how they regard themselves and expect others to regard them, only from the printed pages, and if in those pages the justices present a slipshod and slovenly appearance, they detract, so far forth, from their own dignity. When a mem ber of the Court falls into gross errors in the use of English, or writes a long, in volved, obscure and evidently hasty sentence, he commits much the same fault as if he should hurry into court dressed in a shoot ing jacket instead of the customary robe of black. Judges, of all men, are to be not only excused but commended for taking themselves seriously; and this, though not perhaps the chief reason, is at least an im portant one, why they should have regard to the style of their judicial opinions. A fine example of judicial dignity may be ' found in the opinion of Lord Hardwicke in the leading case of William Penn v. Lord Baltimore (i Ves. Sen. 444). Speaking of the importance of the case. Lord Hardwicke said : — "It being for the determination of the rights and boundaries of two great provincial govern ments and three counties; of a nature worthy the judicature of a Roman senate rather than of a single judge; and my consolation is that if I
