Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/174

 ISO THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

��PRACTICE.

��AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CONCORD, N. H., DECEMBER 27, 1881.

��BY TOHN M. SHIRLEY, ESQ.

WHAT I have to say to-night is primarily a family talk to students and those who have just entered the profession.

The law, like everything else of human origin, is the creature of growth, and subject to decay.

In 1800 there were some three or four volumes of reports published in the United States — all told. They could all be carried with ease in any lawyer's green bag with his papers.

To-day we have a variety of criminal reports, railway reports, reports in pat- ent cases, probate or surrogate's reports, and selected reports on special top- ics with annotations.

There are thirty-six volumes of the American Reports, so called, which are increasing at the rate of four or five volumes per year.

When we have them in full, we shall have some seventy-five or eighty volumes of the American Decisions.

Besides all these we have of the reports of the federal courts, — supreme, circuit, and district, — and those of the court of claims and of the I^istrict of Columbia, and of the higher courts in the several slates and territories, three thousand volumes in round numbers which are increasing at the rate of about one hundred volumes annually.

Mark the contrast !

But this is not all. The work has only just begun. New territories are to be converted into states ; old states are to be divided ; large states are to be split into fragments ; the old world is emptying its surplus population upon our shores as never before ; the migration from the old to the new states goes on apace ; cities spring up by magic ; and over what, but a few years before were deserts or unknown lands, great trans-continental hnes of railway are pushing ; great rivers, the arteries of commerce, have been spanned by bridges costing sometimes twenty million dollars, the greatest feat of engineering of modern times ; soon the whole country will be gridironed with railroads ; and the " tongue of fire," as Whittier called the telegraph, will be everywhere : — All this with the complexities of what we term civilization, and the lightning pace at which we travel, builds up gigantic interests which must be the subject of liti- gation, changes the character of our people and their modes of thought, and must result not only in a change in the machinery of litigation — the forms of procedure in our courts — but a change in the structure of the body of the law itself throughout the union.

If in eighty years we have gone up from two or three volumes of reports to as many thousand, what is to confront those who are to come after us?

We may divert, but nothing can stop the rush of the current, or the sweep of the stream. If what we have seen is the green leaf, what shall we have in the dry? If what we have seen of the publication of reports, is the art in its babyhood, what is it to be in its maturity? From where are the eyes to come to read these volumes ; where shall we find the time to master the problems which these reports present ; to evolve light from darkness and make crooked things straight?

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