The change may well be seen in our colleges and law schools, where there are many professors who think they know better what law ought to be, and what the principles of jurisprudence ought to be, and what the political institutions of the country ought to be, than the people of England and America, working out their laws through centuries of life. And these men, who think they know it all, these half-baked and conceited theorists, are teaching the boys in our law schools and in our colleges to despise American institutions.

Here is a great new duty for the bar, and if we have not been hypocrites during all these years in which we have been standing up in court and appealing to the principles of the law, appealing to the principles of our Constitution, demanding justice according to the rules of the common law for our clients; if we have not been hypocrites, we will come to the defense and the assertion - the triumphant assertion — of those principles upon which we have been relying.

All classes and conditions of men are organized, the merchants, the manufacturers, the bankers, the clergymen, the farmers, the laborers, actively interested in the promotion of the ideals of their class or their calling. It is for lawyers to perform the highest duty, for the ideals of their class, or their calling, are the ideals of our country's free institutions.

In the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, which we founded here forty-five years ago, and that admirable County Bar Association, which has broadened out from the old association; in the admirable success of the State Bar Association, over which you, sir, preside with such efficiency and grace; in the vastly increasing numbers of the American Bar Association, we can see steps toward the accomplishment of this high duty of our profession, for that duty cannot be performed by the lawyer alone immersed in the interest of a particular case; it can be performed only by stimulating and elevating a public opinion of the bar and

through that influencing the public opinion of the country. Who is there who can speak with such authority to the American people as the body of the bar, which represents them in the administration of the law of their country? Who is there on whom rests so great a responsibility for the preservation of the fundamental principles of the law, and who is there who, by tradition and teaching and the habits of their life, ought more gladly to accept the duty of making the fundamental groundwork of American liberty a reality among a devoted and patriotic people?

The whole business of government, in which we are all concerned, is becoming serious, grave, threatening. No man in America has any right to rest contented and easy and indifferent; for never before, not even in the time of the Civil War, have all the energies and all the devotion of the American Democracy been demanded for the perpetuity of American institutions, for the continuance of the American Republic against foes without and more insidious foes within, than in this year of grace 1916.

I am glad to come back to the bar in this time of its trials; I am proud of it. I believe in it, and I have confidence in the performance of its high duty in the future.

PUBLIC SERVICE BY THE BAR

ADDRESS AS PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION
AT THE ANNUAL MEETING IN CHICAGO
AUGUST 30, 1916

NE of the most striking effects of the great war is the

followed the spur of necessity. All over Europe among the struggling nations the virile and simple virtues have emerged from beneath habits of selfish indifference. Industry, inventive energy, thrift, self-denial, acceptance of discipline, subordination of individual preferences to the general judgment, loyalty to ideals, devotion to country and willingness to make sacrifices for her sake have become general. A new gospel of patriotic service has replaced the cynicism of privilege and personal advantage.

This change relates not merely to military efficiency but to the whole social economy and extends throughout the field of production and to all forms of consumption and waste. It carries a sense of individual responsibility by each citizen to help make his country strong by production and by conservation.

When the war is over we shall find ourselves in a very different world from that which witnessed the Austrian ultimatum to Servia. It will be a world in which the greater part of the nations return to the peaceful competition of production and commerce with a vast increase of power to compete caused by the training of hardship and sacrifice. Plainly, the neutral nations who have neither endured the sufferings nor achieved the rewards of this hard experience may not look with indifference upon these events. They should realize the increased efficiency which they will have to meet when

they enter again upon the competition in which all civilized nations must engage. In the amazing developments of these years there are lessons for us to learn which we must not ignore. There are lessons not merely as to submarines and aëroplanes and high explosives, but as to the whole effective capacity of the nation by which it maintains its place and progress in the world in peace as in war. No human power can withhold the United States from taking part in the international competition which will follow the return of peace. It is not a matter of volition. It cannot be controlled by legislation or by change of parties or by voting. The entire community of civilized nations is going through a phase of development from which no one of them can escape and continue to hold its own, and one of the necessary incidents of that development is competition in production and trade. The United States must therefore be prepared to meet competition carried on more effectively than ever before. The power of organization will be at its highest; the advantages of applied science will be greatest; the hindrances of internal misunderstanding and dissension will be at a minimum.

One of the most important features of the present European development for Americans to consider is the fact that it has been along the line of military organization and discipline. That surrender of individual liberty to superior control which is essential to the discipline and efficiency of an army has been extended to civil life and applied in governmental direction of productive industry, of transportation, and of consumption. The habits of communities accustomed to the least possible control over individual action proved wholly unfit in a sudden emergency to meet the military competition of highly disciplined masses. The question how far the abandonment of individualism and the establishment of rigid government control is to be continued or extended for purposes of efficiency in peaceful competition is of the highest

interest and importance to us. This importance is quite independent of the question how far it is probable that we shall be required to defend our wealth and security against aggression by armed force.

In either view it is plainly the duty of all Americans, whatever their calling, to consider by what means they can contribute through either the increase or the conservation of power in their own fields of action, towards the permanent higher efficiency of the people of the United States.

There is no body of citizens to whom this duty should appeal more strongly than to the lawyers, because the subject vitally affects the relations between the individual and the state regulated by law and the fundamental conceptions upon which our system of government is based.

There are two relevant truths of universal application and appeal. One is, that the people of the United States need in one important respect a change of the individual attitude toward their government. Too many of us have been trying to get something out of the country and too few of us have been trying to serve it. Offices, appropriations, personal or class benefits, have been too generally the motive power that has kept the wheels of government moving. Too many of us have forgotten that a government which is to preserve liberty and do justice must have the heart and soul of the people behind it not mere indifference. Too many of us have forgotten that not only eternal vigilance but eternal effort is the price of liberty. Our minds have been filled with the assertion of our rights and we have thought little of our duties. The chief element of strength which the nations of Europe are acquiring is the spirit of their people, who have learned a new loyalty of devotion and sacrifice for their country. In a world where that spirit prevails the United States will slip back in the race unless we, too, have a new birth of loyalty and devotion.