THE LAW AND LAWYERS her desert bosom; and after you have ob tained a very considerable verdict and col lected the judgment, "cuss the court" for its charge to the jury, and then pocket one half of the proceeds for your fee? Do you go to the legislature and get the laws changed so as to promote pernicious litigation by abrogating long-established rules of law, crystallized by the learning and experience of the most erudite lawyers and the wisest jurists, so that the shyster and the charlatan may have "ample scope and verge enough" to win causes against the lawyer whose fame is the honest work and study of years — •vigilanii annorum lucitbrationis? It can never be too often said or too earnestly urged that the profession of the lawyer is essentially an intellectual pursuit. It involves the noblest attributes of the mind and heart, and the richest endowments of education. As its practice should be in separable from the idea that it is the servitor of justice, its pursuit should never cross the side lines of morality or deflect from the pathway hedged about with honor. There should be no place in it for the man who knows no ethics and affects no morality. It should be inhospitable to the charlatan and hostile to the pretender. The American Bar and Bench are to-day confronted both with a condition and a the ory. It is manifest to every observant, thoughtful person, that the body politic is possessed of a fever of unrest. Conditions here and there, inseparable from the ener gized activities of such a country and such a people as ours, afford occasion for the spasmodic doctrinaire, the agitator, and the pseudo-reformer. Nothing so demonstrates the necessity for stability of fundamental law, and the unyielding adherence to its settled rules of construction, in such times, because they hold in leash the demagogue, the time-server, and the revolutionist. The shyster proclaims that the Bar Asso ciations design to build up a professional aristocracy and a monopoly in practice. The political demagogue inveighs against
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constitutional restraints and limitation as impeding and obstructing the present wants and demands of certain classes of the people. The public press arraigns the judiciary for adherence to precedents instead of making "case law," to gratify the unreasoning and unappeasable appetite for sensational, dras tic administration of what it calls " oppor tune justice." College professors, who often recall what a publicist said, that if he desired to punish an organized community he would assign a philosopher to govern it, are constantly in their lectures hurling invectives against es tablished rules of law and settled principles as false in theory; that they should be abolished in order to liken our system of jurisprudence and procedure to that of the French, to have no legal precedents, but let every case, like the heathen, be a law unto itself. These idealists would have substituted eighteenth century sociology for our twen tieth century notions of organized govern ment. They contend for the social com pact theory, that men should obey the government and the law merely because of the advantages they derive from it, and that, therefore, both should be laid aside, as frayed and worn-out garments, whenever the members of the compact conceive that they do not fully share in their beneficence. Rousseau was the highest exponent of this doctrine, the infection of which caused the brilliant and volatile de Lamartine to assert that "the state takes upon itself the mission of enlightening, developing, spiri tualizing and sanctifying the souls of the people," and consequently if it fail in any of these it should not claim either allegiance or service of the citizen. In contradiction to this, at the dawn of the nineteenth century came Jeremy Bentham, with his clear demonstration of the unhistorical and unphilosophical social com pact theory, substituting for it the saving doctrine that law is the common force or ganized for the composite whole to oppose
