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THE members of the bar have shared in the horror and sorrow felt by all good citizens at the assassination of the President; and because of their influence, direct and indirect, upon legislation, on them, more than on any other class of citizens, rests the grave responsibility of solving, or of attempting to solve, two serious questions which are pressing to be answered : what punishment should be meted out — and by whom — to the assailant or the assassin of the President or other high official of our Federal government, and what, if any, restrictive legis lation should be enacted in respect of public utterances of an anarchistic nature. It behooves all good citizens to consider these questions calmly and seriously; and we commend to their consideration, and especially to the attention of members of the legal profession and to our legis lators, the wise and conservative words of Pro fessor Wambaugh in the earlier pages of this issue of the GREEN BAG. NOTES.
UNDER date of February 12, 1787, a corres pondent in Hartford, Conn., wrote as follows to a newspaper of the day : The great increase of lawyers among us since the Revolution begins to give serious concern to all good men, and I am told a pamphlet of more than one hundred pages is now in the press, or soon will be, proposing an easy method to reduce their num bers in less than six months. Peter the Great, in his time, had but four law yers in his whole dominion, and two of these he hanged. For my own part, I will read no tedious essays on this subject. Let individuals check the present prevalent spirit of wrangling and litigation, and the number of attorneys will soon become in considerable. No man will follow any trade or pro fession longer than he can live by it.
REPRESENTATIVE WEILEP, a Kansas legislator, is probably the only man in the world who has been allowed by a court of inquiry to testify re garding what he said to himself. In 1895 a committee was appointed by the Kansas legislature to investigate the alleged bribery of certain members in connection with a defeated railroad bill. Mr. Weilep was the first witness called by the prosecution. In the course of his testimony he told of seeing Representative M late one night coming down a hotel stairs. " 1 said to myself," continued Weilep, but a member of the defense had jumped to his feet. "Hold on! " he shouted, "you can't testify about what you said to yourself 1" The prosecutor retorted hotly that there was no law to prohibit Mr. Weilep from so testify ing. Both serious and ludicrous was the argument that ensued. A majority of the committee fin ally concurred in the chairman's decision, that the witness had a right to tell what he said to himself. "I said to myself," seriously proceeded Wei lep, " that M had been up to Billy Carter's room to get his pay." The testimony was recorded and made a part of the official record of the Kansas house. SOON after Daniel Webster came to the bar, he was retained in a suit between two neighbors. It seemed that they had got to loggerheads about a disputed line, out of which had grown tres pass suits and all sorts of controversies, and that the more malicious and artful of the two had so plied the other with law in one shape or another, that he had nearly ruined him. The latter at last became aroused, and brought an action against the other for malicious prosecution and retained Mr. Webster to manage it. On the trial, proof of malice was clear and convinc ing, and it was evident that the day of reckon ing had at last come. In summing up for the
