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The Green Bag
all these things occurred within the body of Franklin County?" “Yes," and so he sent his client to the penitentiary for years.
vincial prejudice, however strong, can set aside, and that its arcana are safely
ensconced in a higher law library some where, which not even the angels would
wish to ventilate in accordance with A SUMPTUARY LAW LIBRARY E desire to condemn the action of the Law Library Association of St. Louis, in defeating a by-law which would have allowed members to smoke
in the library. It was Aristotle who said that man is by nature a social ani mal, implying that he is a born smoker. Thus to impose Puritanical restrictions on a natural impulse of the race is an evil of sumptuary legislation, and law
yers should be the first to rebel against it.
The St. Louis Republic, in an edi torial which lends added dignity to the moral victory of the defeated minority in the Association, ofiers shrewd coun
sel to ascetic organizations of lawyers throughout the land. It says:—
the whims of efiete and debased hu manity.
MR. CHOATE'S EXPERIENCE AT THE BAR T the opening of the joint meet ing of the American Historical and American Economic Associations,
December 28, in New York City, Hon. Joseph H. Choate presided, and men tioned that one practical question had been already settled which might well have been left to the theorists. Presi dent Nicholas Murray Butler, deliver ing the greetings of Columbia, referred to the settlement of this question as
follows :
young men for war"; but we have reached a place in the advance of things legal where counsel is war.
"Straight whiskey has been defined. I would have supposed that the President would have referred so diflicult an economic question to the chairman of this meeting. Surely his long experience at the bar must have qualified him to guide us in the matter of labels." “I will explain," retorted Mr. Choate, "why the great question was not referred to me. For two years I was one of the coun sel of the people and opposed a little group of whiskey distillers in Kentucky manufac turing what they contended was the only whiskey. The people asserted that any thing they were in the habit of calling whiskey was whiskey. In my enthusiasm I ap proached the British Embassy and tried to
We believe that the true maxim is
enlist it in the popular cause, but Mr. Bryce,
that in a multitude of counsel there is safety, safety being the better part of
though he had represented a Scotch constitu ency for twenty-five years, did not know one kind of American whiskey from another. "It is a pure question of taste, and if the President had submitted the question with the samples we submitted to him to the
We learn with surprise that in the align ment upon the question in the Law Library Association the line of demarcation cor responded roughly to a certain intermediate point in the span of human life——nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, as Dante phrases it-and that the young men were arrayed on the side of smoke, while the lean and
slippered pantaloon stood for an unobscured sky line and air as clear as the crystal of Heliconian dawn. And age won! An an cient proverb reads, "Old men for council,
valor. However that may be, an Asso— ciation which should have been fore
most in upholding free institutions and masculine traditions has fallen victim
to senility and decay.
Let this serve
as a warning to other associations that
there is a higher law, which no pro
authorities we have here tonight, to the exec
utive committee of the nomic Associations, they this great historical and exactly as the President
Historical and Eco would have decided economical question has done."
