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The Green Bag

sively to the formation and guidance of sound public opinion. This assump tion, taking for granted a wide diffu sion of lofty ideals and a genuine solici tude for the highest good of society, had the necessary consequence of en couraging earnest devotion to aims which the lawyer may be tempted to regard as lying somewhat beyond the field of his profession, properly concerning the pub licist more than the lawyer, yet aims, after all, quite as legitimately his own, to be entered upon in no spirit of diffi dence or apology, but with the con viction that they have a direct and vital rather than a visionary and remote bearing upon the problems of his active professional career. Thus Lord Haldane had in mind the best traditions of the Anglo-Saxon com mon law, the traditions of the bar and bench which have made experience count for more than logic, which have made the law living and growing, and have repelled the influence of the legal techni cian, who is devoted more to the letter than the spirit, more to the form than to the substance of legal institutions — he had in mind not that devotion to the syllogism which notwithstanding the absence of codes has characterized much of our legal development, but sensitive ness to what Mr. Justice Holmes calls "the felt necessities of the time" — when he said, in summing up the first point of his address: "We [meaning the lawyers of three closely related nations] can do much to influence opinion, and the history of our law and the char acter of our tradition render it easy for us to attain to that unity in habit of thought and sentiment which is the first condition of combined action." The speaker took his second point from the field of sociology and ethics, and expounded it with that deep philo sophical insight for which he is noted,

further elucidating it with illustrations drawn from dramatic and inspiring epi sodes in the past life of nations. He advanced the modern conception of Sittlichkeit: "The law forms only a small part of the system of rules by which the conduct of the citizens of a state is regulated. . . . There is a more exten sive system of guidance [than law or con science] which regulates conduct and which differs from both in its character and sanction. . . . We find within the single state the evidence of a sanction which is less than legal but more than merely moral, and which is sufficient, in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any ques tion of resort to force." For this sys tem of Sittlichkeit Lord Haldane said we had no English word. The concept is not unfamiliar, however, because of the attention that recent writers have given to the subjects of "mores" and "folkways," and when "public opinion" and "common usage" are referred to in a temporary writing and speech as sanc tions for law, municipal or international, these loose expressions must usually include what is more accurately defined by the term created by German philoso phers. Lord Haldane then reached the third, most important point, which supplied the real theme for his discourse on "Higher Nationality." In the first two points there was nothing novel or re markable, the interest coming chiefly from the manner of exposition, but the third, implying the conception of a community intermediate between the nation and the community of nations, was indeed striking. This third point was found in an affirmative answer to the following question: "Can nations form a group or community among them selves, within which a habit of looking