ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT FREDERICK W. LEHMANN OF ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI. Gentlemen of the American Bar Association: Fourteen years have passed since the American Bar Association met in this city, but that time has not been sufficient to efface from the memory of those present the impression of the cordial hospitality of its people, and coming here a second time they enjoy the twofold pleasure of forming new associations and reviving the old. During the intervening years we have traveled far and wide, like Ulysses, who, "Wandering from clime to clime observant strayed, Their manners noted and their states surveyed." We have held our sessions in the Empire State, and in the state first to be formed out of that territory, which, from the beginning, by the accord of all our people, North and South, was dedicated to institutions of freedom and equality, in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains and of the Rockies, upon the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and upon the banks of the great river that rolls between, and, having compassed the land in all its breadth, we come again to this city, so closely related to our history of empire, the scene of so much of its romance, and where was made, by the greatest leader of our native races, a last vain effort against that course of events which brought this vast country' under the dominion of one language and one law. It is my duty under the Constitution to make, in another fashion, an excursion more extensive than that which the Association has made during these years. To review the legislation of the past year means to bring under observation the enactments of Congress and of forty-four states and territories. The odd numbered years are the active ones in lawmaking with us. Seven states and territories provide for annual sessions of the Legisla ture, forty-three for biennial sessions and one for quadrennial. Of the biennial sessions thirty-seven have been held since our last meeting. Reviewing the memoirs of Lord Burleigh by Dr. Nares, Macaulay says: "We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches of cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois." There is a disposition on the part of critics to consider modern legislation in the same way. They number and measure the volumes, count the pages and enactments and let the magnitude of the total speak the condemnation of every part. But this is manifestly unfair. Each state legislates only for itself and a proper quantitative analysis, therefore, requires that we deal with a single typical volume. Even this may seem large as the contribution of two years, but eliminate the appropriation bills, the administrative, local and temporary measures, and indeed all those laws, which, as Charles Lamb would say, are no laws, and the bulk remaining in any case is not great. The trend of public thought and action in the different states is very much along the same lines, and the same subjects recur in the legislation. The mode of treatment, however, often shows many differences, so that a comprehensive comparison of what has been done would transcend not only the limits of your patience, but of your endurance as well. Laws in the sense of positive regulations by the public necessarily increase with the increasing complexity of the social structure, and with the wider extension of civil and political rights. Where the interrelations of men are few and simple, the laws will be so, and where the power to make the laws is confined to a minority, the welfare of the many will suffer as much from neglect as from oppression. All government is paternalism. It is welcomed when it manifests a care and extends a protection of which we feel the need and resented when doing this for others. it curbs those powers which through free use we have come to look upon as rights. |