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THE GREEN BAG

injustice, and that the people obey the law, as declared by the courts, because it comes from the source of expounded justice. Macaulay well said that Bentham found the system a gibberish and left it a science. Being invested with force to compel justice, the law can neither oppress any person nor despoil him of his property, liberty, or life, because its mission is to protect; or as Cato expresses it: "The very laws themselves wish that they should be ruled by right." It is thus that the law gives stability to government, certainty, and assurance to the administration of justice. Under its genius business transactions are least trammeled, fewer artificial obstacles are interposed to individual pursuit, and the freest play is given to individual talent, because the law hedges them about with exact rules, founded on experience and rational science. If I might be indulged the liberty of an apt term to designate it, I would call cer tain tendencies of the day spasmodical emotion. The public press has recently ex coriated the judiciary for holding that the Federal Constitution means just what it says, that "no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." It so declared because mistaken popular opinion took advantage of the re vulsion of popular feeling against corrup tion and bribery in high and low places, demanding that we should, in semblance, return to the epoch of trial by hue and cry, with its concomitants of the thumb-screw, the pillory, and the rack. And forthwith a headless legislature is swept from the pedestal of staid, conservative judgment by an enactment as if it could nullify or sus pend the supreme law of the land, little reckoning of the pit from which the framers of our national organic law dug us, and the rock on which they sought to place our feet. Akin to this ebullition of excitement that is stimulated into dangerous activity on successive temporary provocations, a clamor arises from the press and the hustings about "a millionaire Senate"; and every town and

county convention passes resolutions de manding that the Federal Constitution be amended so as to enable some fellow to get into the Senate who is vox, praeterea nihil. The man who said that "money talks" did not realize how this would be discounted by the modern politician, who is "a verbal horror and a rhetorical nuisance." Some selfish, ambitious fellow, like a Saxon baron, is able to gather around him in his fortress of influence a band of super-serviceable ad mirers, whom he teaches to cry out *' Aut Ccesar, ant nihil," and thereby prevent the election of a senator by the legislature, and, forgetting the wholesome maxim that "it were better to endure the ills we have than fly to those we know not of " a popular clamor arises for direct election by the people. Gentlemen of the Bar, I am an oldfashioned believer in the notion that the wisest, the most far-seeing and unselfish patriots the world ever produced were the men who made our federal form of govern ment. They were not school men or ped ants, much less were they mawkish phil anthropists or "furious doctrinaires." They wasted not their oil in rude lamps over the profundities of Locke, the philosophy of Hume, or the metaphysics of Burke. But they were more heroic than Jason's crew, and they sought and grasped a prize more precious than the poet's fancy. No such state builders, or more cunning artificers of government the world ever saw. They had explored all lands of history, and gar nered all that was valuable in statecraft, and all the rich treasures of the science of government. They had felt the keen edge of oppression. They stood at the cradle of republican liberty and witnessed the nation's baptism of blood. They drank from the very air about them the spirit of personal freedom and the abhorrence of despotic power. In the very creed they formulated lurks the spirit of the men who made it. The framers of our Federal Constitution had, under the old articles of confederation,