the bar as a whole is still apathetic. The impetus to reform and improvement has come almost wholly from the law schools with little aid from the profession at large or from the various bar associations of the country. In this respect the bar has lagged behind the medical profession which has set us a commendable example in taking steps through the American Medical Association to adopt high standards of professional training and to grade the medical schools of the country according as they measure up to those standards or fall below them. In all but one state attendance at and graduation from an approved medical school is required before admission to practice medicine. But no state requires the study of law at a law school as a prerequisite to practice law and no state requires a preliminary education beyond that of a high school to prospective members of the bar.

It is a false notion of democracy that would deny to the state the right to exact adequate training and skill from its public servants or that would assume that equality of political rights should entitle the citizen to any right to enter a learned profession without adequate qualifications for the performance of its duties.

The argument is often advanced that a standard sufficiently high to improve the bar generally would have kept Abraham Lincoln from becoming a lawyer. This argument is without merit, principally because it is based on a false assumption. Abraham Lincoln as a young man had an education superior to the standards of education which prevailed in his own community. Had he lived in this day and generation who is there who knows of his life and character who could doubt that he would have availed himself to the utmost of the educational advantages which are open to every man of ability and character regardless of his station in life. With our present educational facilities no standard of admission to the bar which has ever been proposed would have kept any man fitted by character and ability for membership in the bar from entering it. The danger until recent years has been not that we would keep our Abraham Lincolns from the bar but that by our indifference to the problem we should permit the bar to be discredited and its influence destroyed by an inundation of the unfit. The notion that the bar in this country could ever have become an undemocratic institution through increased educational standards is an utterly mistaken one. There is no force in American life more potent for democracy and the preservation of our free institutions than the education of our colleges and universities. No section of our country asks for less democracy but all should ask that the agencies of democracy should be more intelligent, better trained and better fitted to bear their responsibilities.

In the years since I came to the bar much progress has been made toward securing a wider and better understanding of this problem. Nearly all states now have uniform examinations; in many the examinations are more exacting, but in most they leave much to be desired. In all states preliminary educational requirements are too low. The better class of law schools have raised their own standards and they are preaching unceasingly the gospel of a better bar through better education and higher standards. What is now needed is closer coöperation between all agencies for improvement of the bar,-the law schools, the bar, the courts, and the bar associations. The American bar, like the American Medical Association, ought to be neither afraid nor ashamed to say what it considers adequate training for the bar,-what schools provide it, and what boards of bar examiners exact it.

I have said that I regard the third phase of the history of the American bar as now drawing to a close. Just as the phase of our economic expansion must now give place to a period of more intensive development of all our natural and acquired resources, so the field of law will now have to be more intensively cultivated. Instead of the rapid expansion of corporate organization requiring expert service of the best lawyers we shall see corporations more and more transacting their routine legal work in their own legal departments and we may hope to see a greater number of lawyers turn to advocacy and the study of purely legal problems. Through the study of comparative law, through a better understanding of legal doctrine, and through more scientific legislation we may make progress towards the simplification of law and prepare to approach the great problem which the multiplication of precedents embodied in our judicial decisions is pressing upon us. Whether it will be solved by codification or a restatement of the law or by lessening the emphasis placed on precedent, or by some device by which the number of precedents will be diminished, no man can now say. But we may be certain that it will not be adequately solved unless the legal profession brings to bear on it the resources which come from thorough training and an enlightened and intelligent grasp of the nature and functions of law in social organization.

DeToqueville regarded the bar as the most conservative force in our American life, a conclusion which he reached as a result of his own observation. But he might well have reached the conclusion on a priori grounds. The lawyer class more than any other preserves unbroken the continuity of the past with the present. He formulates his rules of conduct on the basis of what has been done in the past. His habit of studying and following precedent inclines his mind to

reverence what is established and to look with distrust on what is novel and untried. The lawyer's habit of caution which so often protects his client from the consequences of rash action is a real conservative force in the community which should not be lightly valued. But the conservative mind is subject to two great dangers, the danger of intolerance and the danger of its becoming "closed mind." I would not be understood as regarding intolerance as exclusively a vice of conservative minds. It is a fault of the radical as well and I find almost as much intolerance among those who pride themselves on their liberal opinion as among the conservatives who are impatient and distrustful of the innovator. To cite an example from our own profession, who could be more intolerant than Jeremy Bentham, the great law reformer who saw in the common law only a "fathomless and boundless chaos made up of fiction, tautology, technicality, and inconsisttency and the administrative part of it a system of exquisitively contrived chicanery which maximizes delay and denial of justice."

The convulsion of war through which the world has just been passing, as was perhaps inevitable, has bred a spirit of intolerance which has found expression in legislation and in law administration and in some instances in the lax administration of it. In the period of reconstruction and readjustment, when the new order clashes with the old, the bar, in legislation, in law administration, should deal with the new problems with a wise tolerance. We ought not in this generation and in the troubled times that are before us to forget that the most precious inheritances which the bar brought from the mother country were our notions of personal liberty and our belief that the function of law is to deal with and regulate conduct and not the freedom of opinion and speech when it does not incite to unlawful acts. One of the great tasks of reconstruction is the winning back from the encroachments of government, that individual liberty which for over 300 years has dominated the enlightened thought of the Anglo-Saxon race. Since the days of Hampden who was trained as a lawyer the members of the profession who at critical times have stood for liberty and justice have given to the bar its real character and influence. They have, to quote the words of Burke, augured "misgoverment at a distance" and snuffed "the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."

As indicative of the part which the bar should play in what I have referred to as the reconstruction period, nothing could be more wholesome than the determination of the American Bar Association to investigate the system of military justice in the United States. Without attempting to express any opinion of the wisdom and efficacy of that system, I believe it is important that as lawyers we should be

keenly apprehensive of the unjust exercise of arbitrary power in our governmental system whether civil or military and that we should be the first in the community to protect the rights of the individual from the encroachments by the exercise of such power whether it be clothed in the forms or law or relies upon popular prejudice or indifference to escape the consequences of its own unlawful acts. For that reason in my judgment the bar of the country has a special duty and mission at this time to scrutinize critically and jealously those laws whose enactment in principle was doubtless necessary to the prosecution of a great war, which encroach upon the field of individual liberty in placing restrictions upon the free expression of opinion and the free communication of information and the expression of ideas. At this time when the world has just been inundated with German falsehood and at a time when, I believe, we are about to hear the preaching of a great deal of false social and economic philosophy, we are prone to forget the teachings of history that in the long run there is greater danger to human progress in the arbitrary repression of truth than in freedom to disseminate falsehood. The Inquisition did not destroy heresy; the truth will thrive without its aid.

Another field for study and investigation by lawyers and our schools of law which places emphasis on the rights of the individual is the just and equal application of the laws to the individual. By this I refer not only to the denial of justice which results from giving rein to the spirit of lynch law and mob violence which is one of the most serious problems of law administration in this country, but to the great problem of making our legal system an effective agency for administering justice where the interest involved is too small or the suitor is too humbly situated to command the legal skill requisite for a just result. Nothing could tend more to cause popular distrust of lawyers and courts and to affect injuriously that which we reverence most in our legal system than the wide spread belief in our growing industrial communities that legal justice which should be free and equally available to all is in practice to be had only in the large cause or by the well-to-do suitor. Nor is there any problem more difficult of practical solution. Whether it is to be met. by the extension of the activities of the Legal Aid Society or whether, as seems more likely, by the reconstruction of our judicial system and a modification of our procedure in the courts for small causes, the problem is one for lawyers to study and settle in the public interest and in the interest and for the credit of their own profession.

It is impossible that we should diligently study the English common law as it has been moulded and adapted by our Equity system without profound admiration and respect for it as, on the whole, as sane and

beneficent a system for the administration of justice as man could have devised. Moreover, the tendency of the common law when placed in direct competition with other systems of law to supplant them gives us faith in its durability and its adaptability to the needs of the people. This attitude on the part of lawyers has given occasion for the charge not always unjustly made that they are overcomplacent and self-satisfied in contemplating the beauties and excellencies of our law.

The habit of lawyers of regarding our legal system as a perfected one and of closing the mind to the possibilities of its improvement is not without its unfortunate consequences to our profession. That Blackstone became so lost in admiring contemplation of the law that he wrote of it as the perfection of human reason must have had an incalculable effect on the generation of lawyers who have accepted his Commentaries as their legal gospel. When we are inclined to think of our law as a finished and perfected system we ought to remember that when Blackstone wrote, the law denied to married women most of the substantial rights of property; the criminal law imposed a catalog of bloody penalties which we would now regard as abhorrent to any system of justice; it denied to the accused the benefit of counsel and the right of appeal; one could not testify as a witness in his own behalf and on the assumption that all atheists were untruthful, it accepted the testimony of atheists who were willing to lie and excluded that of those who had the integrity and moral courage to subject themselves to public contempt by admitting their atheism. We ought not to forget that within the last century nearly all the prominent judges of England, learned and able men that they were, opposed giving to one charged with crime the benefit of counsel. The entire history of our law has been one of change and adaptation to meet new conditions, social and economic, and to conform to a more enlightened ethical perception. In the very nature of things our law cannot become a finished and perfected system until all society itself is both perfect and static.

In the social readjustment which is even now going on as a consequence of the great war the philosophy of law as it finds expression in the theories of contracts, property, and established rights will be subjected to new tests. I would not have lawyers any less conservative in their judgments; I would not have them hold any less reverence for the past or any less confidence in the capacity of the common law to adjust itself to new conditions. But I would have them approach these new problems with open and inquiring minds.

Take for example, the problem of the status in our law of bankers' letters of credit, which will soon be pressing for solution in our courts.