The Editor's Bag be attained for ages to come. We are safe, however, in making the assump tion that the tide of the industrial move ment which began not so very long ago is rising to a level never before attained, and will continue to rise till it is checked by some unforeseen catastrophe. Since the days when Mill wrote, less than a century ago, it may be difficult for many people to conceive that any great change has occurred. It is doubtless from this inability to perceive the momentous workings of social change that the atti tude has arisen which fruitlessly en deavors to preserve an unbroken con tinuity of legal tradition, and resists innovation of every kind. As a matter of fact, over-technicality of legal procedure is bound up with a stage of thought that even now belongs more to the past than to the present, and it is virtually impossible that the cumbrous forms which characterized nineteenth century procedure should survive late into the twentieth. If the ineptitude of legal procedure in this country, during the last century, was bound up with the doctrine of imperfectly co-ordinated individualism and over-reliance on unfettered extrastate initiative of which Mill was the exponent, it seems also true that the "sporting theory of justice" and the overvaluation of property interests were likewise bound up with that system, and therefore belong to a passing phase of legal development. Clumsiness of legal procedure has to give way to speed and simplicity, as the social conscience becomes aroused to the evils of waste incident to a haphazard system; and for the same reason, crude and errorbreeding institutions of jury trial must yield to better machinery for determining the issues of legal controversies. If the bench itself cannot be strengthened, so as to exercise the same control of the
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trial as under the English system, the bar must be, and already we see a rising conception of the lawyer's duty to the court as overriding his supposedly conflicting(!) duty to his client. The sporting theory, the art of an advo cacy to be practised without scruple, will not be able to defy a public opinion which comes to demand elimi nation of levity from the conduct of legal proceedings. Nor, merely to glance at a larger topic, will a future age show any indulgence to the lawyer who makes an impudent defense of the laisser faire dogma that exempts private property These considerations from the spheresuggest of statethe control. com ing of a new type of American lawyer, if it is not too much to say that he has already come. Are we not likely, within the next generation, to see a marked advance, in undertakings that aim at delivering our litigation from cumbrousness, levity, and denial of the right to govern? If so the new lawyer will have the leading part in the approaching drama of legal progress. THE
ANTIQUATED MISSOURI CONSTITUTION OF 1875 "Revolutionary changes in industry and com merce, affecting both country and city dwellers, have created new social problems not foreseen nor provided for by the framers of the constitu tion in 1875 It was the stated conviction of Thomas Jeffer son, the paternal genius of American democracy, that a state should thoroughly revise its funda mental law not less often than once in nineteen or twenty years. Missouri has permitted twice the Jeffersonian period to elapse without acting upon his counsel." — St. Louis Post-Despatch. This is a surprising bit of ultra-con servatism. Have there not been vast social changes in the United States since the day of Thomas Jefferson? And if it was true then that a state should revise its "fundamental" law at least in
