Thus we are still inclined to make the jury trial sacrosanct. There is a persistent effort by federal legislation to prohibit a judge from commenting to a jury upon the credibility of a witness or upon the weight of evidence. We adhere to antiquated rules of evidence out of keeping with modern scientific methods for ascertaining truth. In criminal cases we permit the presumption of innocence to have an undue significance. We retain technicalities in pleadings, both criminal and civil. We pile precedent on precedent until we are staggering under a gigantic mass of decisions in the courts of the United States and of the forty-eight states, so that in the year 1914, 150,000 pages of judicial decisions were printed and nearly 24,000 cases reported; and in thirty years we published 6,000 volumes of law reports.

The problem is not as easy with us as with you in your professional solidarity. We encounter obstacles not dreamed of by you in your "right little, tight little island."

The

Generalization in America is dangerous. United States extends 3,000 miles from east to west, and 2,000 from north to south; it is, roughly speaking, in rectangular form. It is composed of forty-eight different states which in the matter of municipal law are largely independent sovereignties. Efforts to bring about uniformity in some of their laws are constantly being made; and there is some progress. But each state puts forth a great grist of judicial decisions and enacts numerous statutes, and these, of course, it is impossible for any single lawyer to master. But no state court decision is a binding precedent, except within the confines of the state. Diversity of social, political and industrial conditions inevitably affects the laws and the deci

sions. Professional ideals also are naturally affected, and no central power influences the practitioners in the thousands of widely separated localities dependent on each other by the slenderest of threads of professional tradition. Law is practiced in the great centers of population in a manner quite different from that prevailing in the country districts. We are endeavoring to meet the problems thus presented by the formation of bar associations whose purpose it is to elevate the standards of the profession, to preserve and improve the principles of our jurisprudence and its administration, and to produce among members of the profession a brotherly sympathy. During the last fifty years and more, state, county and city bar associations all over the country have been formed, headed by the American Bar Association, having a membership of about 22,000. You have in England and Wales 20,000 solicitors and 10,000 barristers, a total of 30,000 in a population of fifty millions. We have about 125,000 lawyers in a population of a hundred million; that is, proportionately, double the number, and they are spread over a territory forty times as great as yours. Your profession is located largely in London. We have in New York City lawyers numbering sixty per cent of all the solicitors and barristers in the United Kingdom; but their influence upon the lawyers in distant places is as nothing compared with that of the lawyers of London throughout the Kingdom. These figures present the difficulties we encounter in our efforts through associations to secure professional solidarity.

Lord Birkenhead, in the address I have already referred to, called our Constitution a "cast-iron document." I would rather say it was a charter of govern

ment—a contract between sovereign states, each surrendering some of its attributes of sovereignty to secure the mutual advantages of union. It is essentially a political document, whereby the people sought to secure a lasting government by imposing upon themselves checks against momentary impulses, and dividing the powers of government between the states and the central power. Our Constitution is largely occupied in defining the powers of the legislative, the executive and the judicial departments, and distributing betwen the states, and the federal government the powers of government, with a provision that powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people. The first ten amendments to the Constitution contain the Bill of Rights, preserving to the people those traditional sanctions which have resulted from the numerous struggles of Anglo-Saxon people to secure their civil liberties, but in those provisions the American Constitution created nothing new or original; indeed, it was the best opinion of the time that the rights would have existed without embodying them in the fundamental law. The decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States have had a lasting effect in determining the political character of the government. There have always been two schools of political thought in America and if the school headed by Mr. Jefferson had been represented by a majority of the Supreme Court, presided over for many years by Chief Justice Marshall, upon the decisions of that tribunal might have been built a political structure quite different from that under which we are now living. The great historic controversies relating to our constitutional law have not frequently arisen with reference

to personal and property rights protected by the Bill of Rights, excepting the article providing that an individual shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. A great number of cases involving immense material interests have arisen under the provisions giving to Congress the right to regulate commerce among the several states and to legislate for the general welfare. The prohibition in the Constitution against a state passing a law impairing the obligation of contracts has led to many decisions, including that in the famous Dartmouth College controversy. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, providing that a state may not "deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law," has evoked decisions from the Supreme Court of a far greater number than any other provision of the Constitution.

Never before in the history of the world has a court been vested with a judicial function to determine the powers of the other departments of a government; and indeed, the power is not in specific terms granted by our Constitution. But the Supreme Court early in its history concluded that the power existed upon the principle that if state or federal laws were passed purporting to exercise powers withheld or powers prohibited by the Constitution, they were no laws, and when the question was presented in a concrete case it became the duty of the Court so to declare. To this day some doctrinaires deny the existence of this power in the Court upon the fundamental ground that the interpretation of laws passed by the legislature, ought to be interpreted only by that body; but the school of thought represented by Marshall

and Hamilton prevailed in the early decisions of the Court, and in practice they have been acquiesced in. If, as I have said, the views of Mr. Jefferson and other political philosophers of whom he was the leading exponent, had been represented in the Court in the early days, we might have witnessed a disturbance of the balance of powers between the three departments of the federal government, and between the federal government and the several states. What has given stability to the decisions to the Supreme Court has been the long-continued acquiescence of the people. If they had been at variance with their wishes, the way was open, by amendment, to set them aside.

Here then is the interesting feature of our constitutional government. To say that it has bound us by rigid and unyielding shackles is to fail to consider our political history; for from the foundation of our government in the interpretation of our Constitution powers in the federal government were to be implied-the doctrine of strict construction of its language was rejected from the beginning.

But I have, I think, said enough to show you that there is a field of professional activity in our country of the most majestic character into which lawyers of other countries are rarely asked to enter. Questions of constitutional law arise not alone in the federal courts but under the construction of the constitutions of the forty-eight different states, for each of them imposes limitations similar to those contained in the Federal Constitution, with a result that there is a great volume of so-called constitutional law peculiar to the legal literature of our country. It focuses upon problems of government, and broadly speaking, even upon ques