Then we take up the question of parole:

(a) We have tried to get the benefits to be derived under the old system, but have a provision that the trial court at the time of sentence shall recommend the minimum sentence which the defendant should serve before being eligible to parole. The Parole Board is not absolutely bound by that, but the rules provide that they shall not consider paroles in less time than that fixed by the trial judge, unless good facts are shown, something out of the ordinary, which would justify it.

(b) No parole to be given to any person sentenced to life imprisonment until he has served at least twenty-five

years.

(c) If a defendant is convicted of a first offense and was armed with a deadly weapon at the time of the commission of the offense there shall be no parole until he has served a minimum of ten years. And for the second offense armed with a deadly weapon no parole shall be granted until he has served a minimum of fifteen years.

Then we come next to deal with the habitual criminals. Under this statute every person who has been convicted of a felony for the third time becomes under the law an habitual criminal, no matter where the conviction took place, and shall be sentenced to life imprisonment, not so much as a matter of vindictiveness, but that society may be protected from habitual criminals. There are a number of other important provisions in the new code of Criminal Procedure, all designed to bring about swiftness and certainty in the operation of the machinery and I wish that there were time to present them to you, but the time allotted has expired, so thanking you for your attention and interest, I must close.

Thomas H. Franklin, of Texas:

In the short space of ten minutes I can say but little on so big a subject as "Law Enforcement." But what I shall say will be said in plain and unvarnished words for "Men in earnest have no time to waste in patching fig leaves for the naked truth."

I have heard much about the enforcement and non-enforcement of the law. But I have no time in which to say anything of worth as to what may be done to secure better enforcement. There are two things, however, that cannot be done: that is, no law will ever be enforced which law-abiding citizens proclaim cannot be enforced. When that word goes to the criminal he gets the very encouragement that he desires. No law can be enforced if you put the power of its enforcement into the hands of its enemies.

What lies at the bottom of all law enforcement; where are laws enforced; through what instrumentalities are they enforced? They are enforced through the courts, and you will never enforce any law in any court where the personnel of the court entrusted with the enforcement from judge down to district attorney and on to constable stand in any friendly relationship or affiliation, known or unknown, with the criminal element.

Where is our reform to come from then? We talk of new laws. What is a law? It is simply some words printed in a book. It is lifeless. When does it come to life? When it is put into administration. Then it becomes vibrant; then the spirit of life is breathed into it; it takes on dynamic force; it pulsates with the heartbeats of humanity. If the machinery of the law is perfect but the personal instruments to whom is entrusted its enforcement are not satisfactory, the law will fail of enforcement, or be enforced in one community and not enforced in the other.

What makes criminals? Principally, the desire for wealth. What else makes them? The lawlessness of the law-abiding citizen who thinks that he is at liberty to violate some law and enforce some other law against somebody else, and still occupy a position in the ranks of good citizenship.

Have you ever seen a mob? Have you seen three or four thousand murderers gather together to shoot or stab or choke to death an unarmed individual? Who are they? They tell you that they are good citizens in the community. What is their expressed excuse for acting outside of the law? It is that courts are slow in their process of administration and that the law is not properly enforced.

Is that true, gentlemen? Who made the courts in that community? The three or four thousand men that compose the mob. Who made the criminal whom the mob murdered? The three or four thousand people in the community in which he was reared who failed to teach him the obligations of citizenship and failed to enforce the law in the community in which he lived.

Gentlemen, I have heard appeals for changing the law. I have heard appeals for change in methods of procedure. But so long as you do not give consideration to the personal equation in the administration of the criminal law it will not be properly administered.

I join with you, Mr. President, in endeavoring to get legislation that will aid in the efficiency of law enforcement. I join heartily with you and every other member of this Bar Association in securing any change in procedure that may be brought to aid in the enforcement of the law, but I make my final appeal to the men and women constituting the real citizenship of this country to back this Association and to back everyone else who is seeking the enforcement of law.

Let that appeal be properly responded to, and the law will be enforced. We talk about the lowering of the moral sentiment in this country. I do not believe that there has been any lowering. I do not believe in measuring a woman's virtue by the shortness of her hair or the length of her skirt. Nor do I believe in measuring a young boy's citizenship and his moral character by the fact that on some occasion he was found with a hip-pocket flask and a little liquor in it.

I want to tell you ladies and gentlemen that ninety thousand boys of this country were brought to San Antonio when we went into the World War. They were ninety thousand of the flower of this country. I looked into their faces. They were being sent across the water by you to fight for God and principle, so you told them. There were mothers praying in this land that those boys might be returned to them, and if they came back not physically whole they were ready to reach out their arms and clasp them to their bosoms, glad to have only a piece of their boy. But what they prayed for more than anything else was that those boys would be returned to them not morally ruined by their experiences abroad. When I saw those boys, when I looked into their faces and any American who could look into the faces of those boys and not thank God that he was an American citizen, should have some measures applied to him that perhaps would not be justified in a civilized community-when I looked at those boys, I pledged myself to aid in their moral protection by seeking to secure the full enforcement of the law, and by appealing to the best thought, the patriotism and conscience of my fellow citizens, and with the profound belief that the appeal would receive response.

What we need is not more laws, more rules of procedure, but more conscience put into the enforcement of the laws we now

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS.

BY

JAMES M. BECK,

LATE SOLICITOR GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES.

We hold our annual meeting at an auspicious time. It is an anniversary period of great and heroic memories. Ten days ago the Republic, with the joyous io triomphe of a great people, celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

Today we can recall another great memory, which is inseparably connected with the great Declaration. Tonight, one hundred and thirty-seven years ago, the Duke de Liancourt obtained access to the bedroom of Louis the XVI and told that ill-fated monarch of the seizure and destruction that day of the Bastile by a long-oppressed and outraged people. The startled King said: "Why, it is a revolt!" and Liancourt prophetically exclaimed, "No, Sire; it is a revolution."

It would be strange, indeed, if The American Bar Association did not take note of these anniversaries and it is this consideration that has prompted the selection of my subject, “The Future of Democratic Institutions," in response to your gracious invitation to address you. No class can take a more peculiar interest, or feel a greater sense of pride, in these world-shaking events than our profession. Of the fifty-five signers of the Declaration of Independence, twenty-six were lawyers, and of the five hundred and fifty members of the French National Convention, three hundred and seventy were also members of our profession. Moreover, the author of the great Declaration was a young Virginia lawyer, then only in his thirty-third year.

Our deliberations would seem wanting if we did not take note in this sesqui-centennial year of the great epic of 1776, when the Fathers created a new nation and dedicated it forever to the cause of human freedom. The flame then lit on that little altar in Independence Hall still illuminates the world. To countless millions it has been as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of

fire by night. Tom Paine was a true prophet when he said a few months before the adoption of the Declaration, in his stirring appeal, "Common Sense," that "the birthday of a new world is at hand," but he could not have realized the full truth of his prediction. Little did he or any of the Fathers appreciate that they had "lifted the gates of empires off their hinges and turned the stream of the centuries into a new channel."

We can now see, in the perspective of history, that the greatest revolution in human thought and social conditions that the world has ever known and of which both the American and the French Revolutions were but incidents, was then in progress. It had begun long before 1776.

The Declaration did not create us a people. We were potentially a great people before it was adopted. Declarations, constitutions and governments do not create peoples, but peoples create governments and ordain constitutions.

France did not begin its great career with the Fall of the Bastile, and the attempt of the French Convention to revise. chronology by declaring the date of its constitution the year "One" proved abortive. Similarly, the American Commonwealth antedated the United Colonies and, later, the United States of America. It began with the landing of the first English pioneers upon the coasts of Virginia.

As such, the American Commonwealth is the noble child of that great revolution in human thought, the Renaissance. It came into being through the same great impulse that gave to the world Frobisher and Raleigh, Drake and Spenser, Sidney and Coke, Bacon and Shakespeare. Never did human imagination rise to greater heights than in those "spacious days of Queen. Elizabeth," and its finest flower was the birth of democracy in the new world, of which the American Revolution was but a single, although a very noble, result. Of Plymouth Rock, which shares the glory with the shores of Virginia of the great adventure a New England poet has well said:

"Here on this rock, and on this sterile soil,
Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men;
Began the making of the world again.

Here centuries sank, and from the hither brink,

A new world reached and raised an old world link,
When English hands, by wider vision taught,

And here revived, in spite of sword and stake,