EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT and affection of the community which makes up his world." "In all these relations the lawyer can, if he will, exercise a powerful influence over the thought and sentiment of his community." "All these opportunities carry correlative obligations." "The lawyer's profession demands of him something more than the ordinary public ser vice of citizenship. He has a duty to the law. In the cause of peace and order and human rights against all injustice and wrong, he is the advocate of all men, present and to come." "It is of little consequence that any par ticular law fails of effect for want of public assent, except that each instance of disregard of law tends to weaken respect for law in general. But the same inexorable rule applies to the fundamental principles which underlie systems of law. If they come to be without the genuine assent of the people to their jus tice and expediency, they also will fail of effect; a system founded upon them will fail, and a general structural and institutional change will take place." "The path of departure from true principles always proceeds by gradual and unobtrusive divergence. There are comparatively few who appreciate the value and importance of a rule, as distinguished from justice in a particular case. The great rules of right established in our constitutions were of impersonal and im partial origin." "They can be maintained only by a people who believe in them." "To preserve and fos ter such a living faith of the people in the supreme value of the great impersonal rules of right which underlie our system of law, is the highest and ever-present duty of the American lawyer." The rules which constitute such a body of law, however, change from age to age with changing conditions. "Wrong constantly assumes new forms and adopts new methods, and the spirit of the law must answer with new expression and remedy. The law always tends to become fossilized; procedure always tends to become technical and complicated; eternal vigilance and ever recurring reform are the price of
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efficiency. The obligation to lead in these, rests first upon the lawyer." "We find a class of rules," however, "which it is essential to preserve inviolate." "These provisions seldom themselves de clare the principles to which they are de signed to give effect. They secure to the individual citizen certain specified statutory rights, the reason for which is not always ap parent on the surface; and it frequently hap pens in individual cases that the assertion of these specified rights appears to the public to be technical and contrary to the justice of the case. Yet unless rules of law securing these specified rights are maintained inviolate, the general principles which we profess are not practically available for the protection of any citizen." It is the duty and privilege of the lawyer to promote an appreciation of the reasons for these rules. "There is one general characteristic of our system of government which is essential and which it is the special duty of lawyers to guard with care — that is, the observance of limitations of official power. This observance can be secured only by keeping alive in the public mind a sense of its vital importance." "The more frequently men who hold great power in office are permitted to override the limitations imposed by law upon their powers, the more difficult it becomes to question any thing they do, and the people, each one weak in himself and unable to cope with powerful officers who regard any questioning of their acts as an affront, gradually lose the habit of holding such officers accountable, and ulti mately practically surrender the right to hold them accountable." "No one is so well fitted as the lawyer to ascertain the true limits of official authority, and no one can do so much as he to form public opinion regarding this class of questions, upon the lines not of par tisan political advantage, but of independent and impartial judgment." A PERIL to oui judiciary from political preferment for judges, is the subject of a timely article by Hon. Robert McMurdy in the November Albany Law Journal (vol. xvi, p. 335) entitled "Judges as Candidates."
