ROBERT W. HILSCHER. SPECIAL ADDRESS. THE LAWYER'S RELATION TO SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. ROBERT W. HILSCHER, OF WATSEKA. In making a few suggestions upon the Relation of the Lawyer to Social Development, I desire to emphasize the iraportance of such suggestions at this time by calling attention to the fact, patent to every thoughtful observer, that American society has been making history with wonderful rapidity in recent years. In our social and economic growth, epoch's have been marked with unusual frequency. Nor is this strange when we recall the forces that have been at work to this end. The immigration of a thrifty and industrious foreign population, the liberation of an enslaved race, the energizing effect of our institutions of freedom, the rapid development of our natural resources, the elimination of waste of material and energy in the perfection of our factory system, the astonishing growth of our domestic and foreign commerce, the accumula tion of large numbers of vast fortunes by individuals, have all centered in producing social and economic changes, resulting in a greatly advanced standard of life that the most casual observer can not help but be conscious of, and that the student views with wonder. They have wrought little less than a revolution in the methods and course of life. They are changes that practicing lawyers have noted with much concern, because of the effect produced upon their pecuniary welfare. They have noted the fact that some of the sources from which emoluments formerly accrued to them SPECIAL ADDRESS. have been diminished or destroyed. They have seen business which in times past has been a source of revenue to them, disappear from the general practice and become absorbed by more comprehensive business systems, brought into existence at the dictation of economic prudence. They have felt that a certain demoralization has come upon the practice through the rapidly succeeding industrial changes that have taken place in our generation. Within the professional career of men still young, the individual, the partnership and the small corporation have been driven out of business in many industrial pursuits by larger and more potent institutions. These, claiming to act in obedience to economic necessities, have, by reason of their augmented power and efficiency, greatly disturbed many industrial movements and indirectly affected all. The law business has been one of the chief victims of this disturbance. Nor is the resulting damage to the profession confined to its pecuniary phases. One of the marked features of the disturbance alluded to is that it has intensified the commercial element of life. We have grown into a condition in which we demand quick results. The spirit of the age demands the maximum of gain with the minimum of loss. We grow restless without large and quick return from all our energies. In purely commercial matters this may be the height of wisdom; but in the realm where the lawyer performs his high duty to society, there is no profligacy so wasteful as that economy which retrenches patient, prolonged and independent thought. So far as such demands are yielded to, it may be expected that there will follow an impairment of that freedom and independence of thought so essential to the proper administration of the law. Legitimately the law business is a learned profession. It ought to be distinguished from a trade. As a profession it must not depart from a study and mastery of those principles along which the life it deals with moves. It must travel the path of free inquiry and anchor itself upon the conclusion to which such inquiry leads. This is doubt ROBERT W. HILSCHER. less seriously interfered with when a clientage of overpowering commercial or political strength and influence no longer consults the lawyer to ascertain what may or may not be done, what are or what are not its rights, but, instead, commands him what to do. Such a state of the practice is demoralizing to that moral integrity of thought and destructive to that philosophic temper so essential to the highest professional attainment. The highest professional efficiency can not be attained under such conditions. The lawyer must be independent and free to follow where his own best thought leads, and not a cringing and obedient servant of a master who spurns the law by his commands. That the study and practice of the law is in danger of becoming destructively commercialized has been suggested by thoughtful lawyers. That the philosophic and artistic qualities of mind are awkward companions with the commercial spirit, has likewise been noted. Such warnings are worthy of careful consideration. For the study of the law is allied with the study of a comprehensive system of philosophy and calls for a high degree of moral sensibility. Its application to the practical affairs of life, through the various channels by which the law's restraints are made operative, is a difficult and exacting art. Hence it is that we may look with no small degree of solicitude upon the fact that much of the law business of the country is gradually passing from the old time small law office, where the law was studied in the light of that philosophy from which it draws its vitality, to the large law shops where it is too often studied solely with reference to its commercial possibilities and expediencies. I am inclined to think, however, that much of the complaint we hear from lawyers about the shifting of business is due to the fact that we ourselves have been caught up by, and become the victim of, that same spirit of commercialism that is often deplored; that in the midst of many rapidly increasing private fortunes, quickly wrested from trade, we have become wearied of that patient and laborious study and appli SPECIAL ADDRESS. cation that creditable professional life requires. In view of this suspicion let us be reminded that the true lawyer always has sustained, and in the nature of things always will sustain, an honorable and highly important relation to the public welfare. His course of study, his contact with men, his habits of thought, bring him into close relationship to the life of a people as it manifests itself in the formation and reformation of society. This manifestation of life is a growth that follows natural laws and is in eternal warfare against arbitrary rules. They are laws that conventions can not nullify, that legislative bodies can not change. They spring out of human life as it is lived, unfold themselves out of a larger sense of right and a quicker sense of wrong. They grow into wider application with the increasing capacity of a people for a larger life; and a proper knowledge of them leads to the establishment of the institutions that give aid to that life. It is in the struggle which human life makes in organized society for the establishment of conditions that will give aid to its aspirations that the lawyer, in the discharge of his professional duties, performs his most important part in the fashioning of the institutions that are evolved from that life. This may be in matters involving property rights of small pecuniary importance. It may be in matters involving personal privileges of small and only temporary significance. But it will always be in a matter involving a right or privilege that calls for the application and enforcement of principles of morality by which right, in the administration of the laws; is determined. This is not an absolute and unchanging standard, but one that varies with varying degrees of enlightenment. The contentions that such matters provoke are not alone over the application of the principle, but always lead more or less directly to a discussion of the soundness or unsoundness of that principle in the state of the life that prevails. The resulting contest calls into action the tribunals through which the laws of the land are administered. Here, ROBERT W. HILSCHER. through the ingenuity, intelligence and fidelity of the lawyer, the contentions of litigants are discussed, examined, compared, tested and adjudicated in the light of that common sense that lies at the foundation of and directs all social development. For in each such contest there is vastly more involved than the mere determination of property rights or personal privileges. There is a social feature that is never absent from the action of that tribunal. The judgment it pronounces unconsciously does, in the nature of things must, strive after harmony with the increasing and larger life of its age. It is a mistake to suppose that the lawyer is always bound to the past by his reverence for precedent. It is not true that by his habitual search for what has been declared he is made blind to what changed conditions demand. The conservative influence of a precedent may, and fortunately for healthy growth does, operate as a restraint upon the too rapid movement of the over-enthusiastic reformer. But a precedent must always yield to the advanced thought that weakens its authority. The conservative influence of a precedent, instead of binding us hopelessly to the past, instead of closing our eyes to the bright light of the present, enables us to draw unto ourselves and to utilize in the present the wisdom of the past, by holding in check every innovation till tested and measured by it. In gathering up and giving language to the better thought of a people in the light of that wisdom, the lawyer becomes one of the chief instrumentalities through which their life expresses itself in a system by which their social progress is made. In the accomplishment of this end his calling gathers to itself the real dignity of a learned profession. For it is by such process and through such agencies that the more or less vague ambitions of life find expression in rules of conduct. At recurring periods of growth in society men wrangle, grow violent and rage about things they think affect their welfare, all because they can not express themselves so as to be under |