The Green Bag
332
deemed by the expounders of the law to be included among the things con tracted for. To say that such an appli cation of legal principles is upheld by the
“vested
interest"
theory,
is
to
poorly beg the question and beggar the most time-haggard examples of false analogy. The law cannot afford to lend its forces to aid the laity in deceiving them selves with the belief that they are thus “beating the corporations,” for every
incontestible policies came so fully into use, and the courts do not take a stand to
discourage
self-destruction,
it
is
likely that some company will, in the not distant future, blaze a path into a new field of business by refusing to pay suicide policies, holding itself out
as the honest policy-holders’ company
case of suicide which is saddled upon
and giving reduced premiums on account of the elimination of those who are un equal to a Napoleonic facing of destiny. No person should have, or be allowed to transmit to another, an enforcible
the exchequer of the insurance com
right based upon an act as immemorially
panies has a direct tendency to make
condemned by both branches of our law as is self-destruction. And no state should lend its aid to enforce a liability which accrued solely by a wrongful depletion of its powers as a
insurance more costly to those who prefer to die sane. If suicide continues to increase among policy holders as rapidly as many insur ance officers assure us it has since
state.
Oratory and the Lawyer By E. CONNOR HALL
I1‘ is the fashion
nowadays
with
many lawyers and journals to cast ridicule upon oratory, not merely upon particular specimens but upon oratory as an art, and to deprecate its usefulness to the lawyer. Part of this hostility can be ascribed to the human disposition to kick the under dog.
For it cannot be denied that the power of oratory as a weapon of popular warfare has greatly decreased within the last generation. This has been brought about by a variety of causes. First of all, is the increased distribution of the newspaper. The daily paper, by its wide dissemination of information of all sorts, has rendered the reader less hungry for oratorical discussion, and has, at the same time, afforded to him wishing to present any matter to the public an audience more numerous
than the fame of any orator could collect or any human voice reach.
Another cause is to be found in the absence in our time of any of those overshadowing national questions. such as produced Demosthenes and Cicero
in the expiring days of Grecian and Roman freedom; Burke, the Pitts, Fox, Sheridan and Erskine, in the morning
of the modern British Empire; the Adamses, Madison and Randolph in the revolutionary, and Webster, Clay,
Calhoun,
and
Hayne
in the
ante
bellum period in our own country. Orators are subject to that law which operates alike upon all, and will permit
nothing to ripen into perfect develop ment until the conditions of the times have created a need for it. Great
crises are the breeding times for orators, and as we have had none of supreme
