The Courier-Review.
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one at the utterance of this sentence! As file the shadowy kings before Macbeth, so moves by, the long line of calf-clad gentlemen—Glandville, Bracton, Fleet, a Littleton and his commentators, Coke, Bosanque, Puller and so on and so on, and finally closing with the English and American Encyclopedia of Law. But after all is said it is the lawyer who makes the brief. 'Tis he who molds the mass that he accumulates from these multifarious sources in to that which, more than the judges, makes the law, the Lawyer's Brief.
In a brief address spoken to the students of the law department of this University some little time since, I said the lawyers were the Levites, the chosen guardians of the temple and the keepers thereof and in so saying I spoke truly; and a most sacred trust it is, but sacred as it is, yet it is all too often not remembered. By this I do not mean those little remissnesses, happily not common, and always of trifling import, properly characterized as pettifogging. I mean the employment of the law and of lawyer learning to dig mines beneath the foundations of good government.
Macaulay said of the British rule in India that it was a despotism so complete that its only check was its own humanity; irresistable in its power, absolute in its sway—Hindoo and Bengalese, Rohilla and Maratta crouched before it, expecting and receiving no modicum of good, save that vouchsaved by the generosity of the master. The power of the law for good or ill when guided by the hands of the profession is a power almost as great. When the law is made by subtle minds and cunning brains to do that which its creators intended it not to do, when the laws against combines and trusts by clever tricks and keen devices are made to further and foster them; when the attempted legislative control of the great highways of commerce is made by legal causistry to swell the already bloated power of the railroads, then is the mine beneath the government's foundation being dug wider and deeper than even the cunning delvers imagine.
As the Sabbath day was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, so was the law made
for the people and not the people for the law; and all too often in this day of the republic are the methods of Cepola permitted by all-too willing judges torefine away the rights of the people.
When the counsel of the Pennsylvania Railway Company can stand unrebuked in the Supreme Court of that State and threaten its judges with the vengeance of his company, then are the pillars of the Law's fair temple loosened. When the Supreme Court of the United States will decide that the State of Ohio cannot determine for itself what shall constitute the law of negligence within its borders, where a railroad company is defendant, then is the presence of a judicial oligarchy, in fact if not form, so near that its grim features are only thinly veiled by the mists of distance. If my language seems extravagant, think of that judicial iniquity, the blanket injunction with which, within the last half twelve months a dozen federal judges have covered every corporate desire; and if that be not enough, pardon me for relating a personal experience. When the Hon. Lucien Baker and myself were defending those poor deluded creatures commonly known as Saunders' Coxeyites, we were told by a federal judge that, despite the rules against hear-say evidence, a railroad superintendent could testify to the contents of telegrams, then in existence, sent by, he knew not whom, which he had never seen and of which he only knew by their having been read to him. Such things as these come like a shock to the layman's mind unskilled in the niceties of the law—to the mind of the lawyer taught from his Blackstone days, to believe that all are equal before the law they seem as judicial monsters, sans eyes to see the right, sans ears to hear the truth, but with only hands and claws that close and rend when a power, outside the law, unknown to the law, shall chance to give the signal.
Deem me not a Jeremiah crying "Woe is the city," but I say that which I do know; that which great learning is not needed to enable me to know; that when the priests of the temple have ceased to be anything but changers of money the goddess will hide her face.