Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/458

 EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT the states most frequently resorted to for this purpose have materially altered during the last session the annual franchise tax on cor porations. Maine considerably increases the annual tax on corporations having a capital of $200,000 or more. The incorporation fee, however, remains the same. Delaware, on the other hand, reduces the incorporation fee and beginning with 1908 decreases the annual tax on corporations having a capital of $25,000 or over. The decrease on the rate is progres sive with the size of the capital so that it is now much less than the tax in Maine. There is also a provision for a discount to corporations not actively engaged in business which will doubtless prove attractive to a certain class of companies. In the competition of states for revenue from this source under our present absurdly artificial system of incor poration these new rates will doubtless cause a migration of our intangible legal entities to the milder climate of Delaware. CRIMINAL LAW REFORM In reply to a recent editorial in the Nation upon criminal law reform Mr. Herbert L. Baker of Detroit has written a letter to that journal commenting with keen insight upon the causes of anachronisms in the law from which we quote the following: "The commercialism which now pervades American society at large pervades also the legal profession, and largely determines its character. American lawyers may be roughly divided into two classes, one of which is struggling for wealth and the other of which is struggling for existence; and each class is so

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absorbed as to have little time and no in clination for the cultivation of legal science or plans for social betterment. "From the very nature of its calling the legal profession is intensely conservative. Its pri mary function is to administer rather than to make the laws — to deal with the law as it is, rather than as it ought to be — leaving it to the lawmaker to determine the latter. More over, it realizes more vividly than any other class that changes are always dangerous, because the entire framework of society is supported by an intricate network of laws which are so intimately interwoven that any radical change is likely to work harm rather than good. In all progressive countries the law must be constantly changing, because conditions are constantly changing. These changes would naturally be made by legisla tion, but in common-law countries like our own they are made for the most part indirectly by judicial decisions. Through long and devoted adherence to this method of adjusting laws to social needs we have strengthened and confirmed the habit of its use, and at the same time caused the legislative method to be neglected. "The situation may be briefly summed up by saying that in some of its essential fea tures our system of trial by jury has become an anachronism, and that the work of revising it to meet changed conditions without destroy ing it, is one of the most important and difficult problems that we now have to face. It re quires the cooperation not only of lawyers, but of intelligent and public-spirited citizens of all classes."