"The problem, How not to tell the truth with curse. The law, intensely modern, always leagued out telling a lie, is suggested for solution over and in sympathy with the present, always devoted to over again, not only to lawyers, but to physicians, the practical, favors no fossils but its own. These bankers, brokers, merchants, mechanics, farmers, it cherishes — sometimes too fondly — as priceless even perhaps to clergymen, and, it may be, to the gems, inherited from ancestral opulence, the hoards very ladies. Nothing would simplify intercourse of those grand old legal millionaires, the early

An image should appear at this position in the text. To use the entire page scan as a placeholder, edit this page and replace "{{missing image}}" with "{{raw image|The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/93}}". Otherwise, if you are able to provide the image then please do so. For guidance, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images.

for business, pleasure, civility, and ceremony so much as to give truth the right of way through "The profession will always number among its all human affairs. Those of us who dislike the trouble of suppressing, and are skilled in arts of members some typical lawyers, envoys from the evasion, could heartily past to the present, mes sengers and expounders wish this were practica of precedent." ble; but it is not. It would be wiser to grant "Time is the increas free passage to a cyclone. ing factor, the growing In the use of truth the element of modern life. lawyer is eclectic; say, Progress is the realiza if you please, he is eco tion, in short time, of nomical. But so is every what formerly occupied body else, and rightly so. long time. At least this A discreet silence is as is one form of progress, much, and perhaps as and that form with which often, the dictate of vir we of the nineteenth centue as of interest or tu ry are i n i m med iate con shame. A man who does tact, — a century that, if not know how to keep measured by results in truth in the house knows some of the spheres of still less how to put it out human activity, might of doors. It would be well count for a thousand much safer practice to years. How is it with disclose nothing than to practical remedial juris disclose everything. Uni prudence? Is it up with, versal silence would do or is it behind the age? less harm than universal Compare it with other and unlimited communi business, public or pri cation. The world would MARK H. BLAMJFOKD vate, — with operations be happier dumb than of the War Department, with no power to hush. the Navy, the Treasury, the Post-Office, the In "' The day is no better bestowed than the night, terior; with commerce, manufactures, banking, And darkness is precious, as well as the light.'" transportation, mining, farming; with the venera Judge Bleckley does not, like Blackstone, ble and conservative vocations of teaching and preaching, — with anything, and what is its rela take a rose-colored view of the law. Its de tive position? The main bulk of the world-work lays and its fossils are thus described : — is ahead of it. Several branches of that work — "Those capital prizes of science termed fossils for instance, the postal service, general transporta are especially odious. They are stigmatized by tion, commerce, and manufactures —-are so far in the practical with the very superlatives of aversion advance that the law seems to crawl, whilst they and contempt. A fossil is lost matter, correspond go on wings." ing, in physical reprobation, to a lost soul in the The following discussion of intellectual spiritual. Stripped to its essence, it is time pet rified by malediction, the past preserved by a honesty has an autobiographic interest: —