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 The Lawyer of Fifty Years Ago his personal independence. We have had conspicuous illustrations of that in Maryland. But we cannot blame the people at large for not being able to realize that such a thing can be. It is a view which can only be understood by those who have been bred in the highest traditions of the law. It follows also that this class of law yers is gradually becoming eliminated from the list of those eligible for elec tion or appointment to judicial office. Fifty years ago the fact that a lawyer had been counsel for a corporation no more disqualified him in the popular mind for appointment to the bench than would the fact that he had frequently defended men charged with murder cause him to be considered unfit to sit in the criminal court. It is not so now. The leader of the Maryland bar today has probably never had a superior among all the great lawyers who have contributed to give that bar a national reputation, the great Pinkney not excepted. Yet there never has been a time within the last twenty years when his appointment to the bench would not have given occasion to more or less criti cism, and only for the reason that he has been always the counsel in Maryland for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Yet the exclusion, total or partial, of men of this calibre and character from judicial service cannot but be recognized as calamitous. Can the country afford to continue to maintain a system which operates in this way? Have we that much brains and character to spare from the pubiic service, and the most import ant of all branches of that service? If the gentleman to whom I have taken the liberty of referring were a mem ber of the English bar, and held the relative position there which he does at our bar, as he probably would, not

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only would he not have been excluded from judicial office, but the Prime Min ister who failed to recommend his ap pointment to the highest courts at the first opportunity which offered, would be the object of the severest public criticism. It must be plain that the exclusion from the bench of so much of the brains and character of the legal profession will inevitably lead to some unfortunate re sult. The due administration of jus tice by courts which command the con fidence of the people, courts which are presided over by men who are not only able and honest but whom the people believe to be able and honest, is absolute ly essential to the perpetuity of any form of government, and particularly a democracy. Hear the words of Rufus Choate: "One of the most specious objections to the free system," says he, "is that they have been observed in the long run to develop a tendency to some mode of injustice. . . . "You remember that Aristotle, looking back on a historical experience of all sorts of government extending over many years — Aristotle, who went to the court of Philip a republican, and came back a republican — records in his 'Polities' injustice as the grand and comprehensive cause of the downfall of democracy. The historian of the Italian democracies extends the remark to them. That all states should be stable in pro portion as they are just and in propor tion as they administer justice is what might be asserted. . . . "Whether republics have usually per ished from injustice need not be debated. One there was, the most renowned of all, that certainly did so. The injustice practised at Athens in the age of Demos thenes upon its citizens and suffered to be practised by one another was as mar