Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 20.pdf/638

 THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS Senator Beveridge introduced a bill putting a prohibition upon interstate com merce in products manufactured by labor of children under a specified age. This bill was reported as unconstitutional. The subject attracted wide attention. The generous, the patriotic and the altruis tic enlisted in the cause and supplemented the work of the national association or ganized for the purpose of securing state legislation limiting child labor within proper bounds. New laws regulating child labor or amending existing laws were passed in 1907 in twelve states, and since our last meeting Louisiana, Kentucky, 'Mississippi, Ohio and Virginia have passed like statutes. We can bear with much equanimity constitutional heresies which if they do no real harm are in their indirect result so beneficent. Having conferred with several members of the Association whom you have honored with your confidence, I submit for your consideration some suggestions as to the Association acquiring and exerting greater strength. We have a membership of 3,376, which is small in comparison with the number of those who are eligible. The census shows that in 1900 there were 114,460 lawyers in the United States. Allowing for deaths, retirement, and the further fact that many by courtesy are enumerated as lawyers who are not in the practice, we may, considering the normal increase of eight years, fairly estimate that there are not less than 80,000 in the United States engaged in the practice of the law. While many of them bring dishonor to the profession, and are a public nuisance that should be abated, the vast majority are worthy of admission to our Association. Our constitution provides that any person to be eligible to membership shall be, and shall for five years next preceding have been, a member in good standing of the bar of any state. This was fixed as a

487

sufficient safeguard by the founders of the Association, and nothing in our experience has demonstrated the 'necessity for more rigid requirements. While we have at our annual meetings an attendance of a few hundred, there were present at the recent reunion of the American Medical Associa tion more than 8,000. There are about 130,000 legally qualified physicians in the United States. The membership of the American Medical Association is 32,000, but through its system of organization it, by direct representation through allied state and county bodies, is the recognized head of nearly 80,000 physicians and surgeons. We would be loath to admit it, if it were a fact, and happily we know that it is not, that there is a higher social or ethical standard in other professions than there is in the law. It should not be more desirable to members of any profession to unite with their national association, either looking to the pleasures derivable from social inter course, or the benefits that are conferred by co-operation. Can it be that the com panionship of lawyers, who are usually accounted by others as the princes of good fellows, is duller, or that their interchange of professional ideas and experiences is less instructive? It is certain that either our reunions are in themselves less attractive, or we have taken less pains to enlist the interest of our brethren. The very pro fession of the law is coy, at least with those who maintain a proper ideal. In our practice we are like the maiden who, how ever expectant and willing, must wait and be asked. This cultivates a habit of reserve in professional relations. I found from efforts to increase our membership, that lawyers, in every way an ornament to the profession, had not joined because they 'had not been invited. They were restrained by a fine sense of delicacy from suggesting their own election. It is a pity that a modicum of the same restraining influence could not be injected into some of those who are rampant for judicial preferment. I