which shall tend to clarify the legal atmosphere to the same extent that the studies of the scientist in the laboratory and the university have clarified that in the medical world. The practising lawyer must, from the nature of things, be a partisan. The time of the judge is largely occupied in deciding individual controversies. There should be some men who can study our legal systems thoroughly and dispassionately, and the fruits of whose scholarship and investigation can be used when codification or legal reform is contemplated.
If it is necessary that we should maintain agricultural experiment stations, and furnish institutions for the study of the science of agriculture, it would also seem that we should furnish equal facilities for the study of government. For law, as we before said, is merely applied political science, applied social ethics, applied civilization. The time indeed is approaching when patriotic citizens can no longer be content to remain in ignorance of the great principles which bind us together, of the rules of conduct which control us, nor refrain from taking an intelligent part in shaping our laws and in directing the public sentiment which, in every truly representative government, the laws must and should formulate. Macauley said that the twentieth century would decide the fate of democracy in America and in the civilized world. De Tocqueville suggested that the crisis would come when the public domain was exhausted. That time has arrived, and we are now no longer a frontier people. If any of us really desire to belong to the governing classes, we must understand the principles which underlie our government, the present status of our legal thought and of our legislation, and the influences which guide our legislatures and our judges. It is often as important to know one's rights when upon a rail road train as it is to know the story of the discovery of the use of steam. It is often as important to know when a contract is or is not binding as to know how to conjugate a verb. It is as important to know when a judge exceeds his powers, when a corporation violates its charter, or a public official his duty, as it is to know the solution of a problem in geometry or the plot of the latest novel. It is as important to know the common law and the history of our legal institutions as it is to be learned upon the subject of Koptic Carum or the laws of the Medes and of the Persians.
The problems which confront the American nation are great and complex. A vast, cosmopolitan country, bound together by law, and by law alone, and where universal suffrage exists, is some thing which, as a continuous entity, many have declared to be an impossibility. Its continuance depends upon the training of an intelligent citizenship, by which law is respected, and which is capable of making and enforcing wise laws. Though controlled and guided for a hundred years by our lawyers, we have, as a nation, sneered altogether too much at law and at lawyers. We have been able to exist and keep ourselves purged of anarchy in spite of our criticisms, because we have been largely a nation of property owners, and therefore conservative. We need criticism, but we need intelligent criticism. No man can criticize a statute or a decision until he has an acquaintance with the body of the law which that statute or decision modifies and changes, or expands. As wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, as immigration increases, as the discontented and radical classes grow larger and larger (where there is democracy there will always be discontent), the number of intelligent,
