Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 17.pdf/461

 THE GREEN BAG had been teaching school in the country, looking for putrescence, or stormy petrels boarding with Squire A., a justice of the fledged amid the waves and nurtured in peace, who told him that all a man had to the tempests of agitation and disorder. do to qualify himself for the practice of law Legislators strive to meet the unreasonable was to study the statutes: "Try me on that, demands of these interests and classes, grow and I will answer you." Whereat Vest put ing out of our complex industries and stim in and said: "Young man, that won't do at ulated enterprises. Any measure or policy, all. The next fool legislature that meets however drastic, visionary, or extreme, goes at Jefferson City is liable to repeal all you into enactment or resolution, under the fury know." of passion and the spur of momentary ex No greater service could be rendered to pediency. It is all-sufficient if it but meetsthe state by the Bar Associations than to the impulse of the hour. Woe unto the judge who must pass upon encourage representative lawyers now and then, prepossessed with no "fad," with no their legality! Yet, he must keep faith with self-serving schemes to promote, but in the law as the Mussulman keeps the faith spired with a lofty sense of duty to the of the Koran, and the Christian that of his commonwealth, to go to the legislature, even Bible. In doing it the judge, at times, if they have to "stoop to conquer" to get finds his Gethsemane; and he must bow his there, and weed out as much as possible the devoted head to the vials of wrath, poured tangled growth that chokes our statutes. from tongue and pen of the disappointed He could at least challenge the attention of authors of illicit conception. " In all that the lawmakers by reading to them the yet tries men's souls how few withstand the burning words of Madison, which have lost test!" It requires a sublimer courage for nothing of their virile force and applica the judge and the lawyer, under such con bility in the wear of 116 years: "What, in ditions, to stand firm, and vindicate the deed, are all the explaining and amending supremacy of law than that of the soldier laws which fill and disgrace our voluminous who confronts the cannon's mouth, or the codes but so many monuments of deficient fireman who mounts his ladder, wreathed wisdom — so many impeachments exhib in flames, to rescue human life from a burn ited by each succeeding against each pre ing building, or that of the life-saver who ceding legislature. ... It is of little avail lashes himself to his boat, to beat the angry to the people that the laws are made by billows, to save the shipwrecked crew in the men of their own choice, if the laws be so midnight storm. The unyielding proprieties voluminous that they cannot be read, or so of his office will not admit of either asking, incoherent that they cannot be understood; and, perhaps, paying at advertising rates, if they be repealed or revised before they for space in the public press, or to take the are promulgated, or undergo such incessant hustings, in his defense. He can only lift changes that no man who knows what the his beaming forehead to the heavens, and law is to-day can guess what it will be to let the tempest expend its fury; trusting to morrow. The law is defined to be a rule that transmuting power "without which we of action, but how can that be a rule which are poor, give what you will; with it rich, take what you will away" — the conscious is little known or less fixed?" One of the greatest burdens of respon ness of having done duty as an enlightened sibility laid upon the judiciary, state and conscience gives him to see it. There is, however, connected with such federal, results largely from inconsiderate, rash, and reckless legislation, to say nothing epochs of sporadic distemper the opportu of confronting those malcontents that infest nity for the real lawyer and the true judge. every community, like carrion birds of prey They disclose the stuff he is made of, the