takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast as that."

That is the difficulty with our juridical process to-day. It is not enough to run; you have got to run twice as fast.

WILLIAM L. RANSOM†

A great deal has been said and written as to the effects of economic and social changes upon the law. I shall try to sketch some of the effects of these changes upon the lawyer. Every period of economic and social readjustment brings a sharp challenge to the learned professions, especially the clergy, the teachers, and the Bar. In each epoch of drastic change, the newer forces find or fancy themselves confronted with the lawyers, and so set up a hue and cry about them as foes of progress, whose prestige and leadership must be overthrown if the aspirations of mankind are to be realized. When "the tumult and the shouting dies," however, and human affairs again resume their more tranquil course, it has always been found that the legal profession has survived what seemed a crisis, and has adapted itself handsomely to the changed conditions.

Ex-President Taft, in the opening sentence of his book on the "Ethics of Service," thus indicated nothing alarming or unusual, in declaring, several years ago, that

"It is not too much to say that the profession of the law is more or less on trial."

The Bar is always very much on trial whenever anything important and far-reaching is taking place under a democratic form of government. And when Dr. Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University, complained to the American Bar Association in 1910 that the lawyer was losing "his old function" and was allowing himself "to become part of the industrial development," it seems to me that he was giving way to pessimism prematurely, at no more than a preliminary stage of the change he saw in progress, and that he was losing sight of the ultimate factors on which the future of the law as a profession ever depends: Dr. Wilson's thesis of social prejudice against lawyers was not at all proved by the allegation that "the old order changeth," in the law as in everything else; the real question was and is whether the American lawyer meets and fulfills his part in the change and adapts his methods of doing business so that he may continue to play an honorable and useful part in the social fabric of the future.

*The alumni address delivered before the annual meeting of the Cornell Law Association, and the Cornell University College of Law.

†Of the New York Bar.

I wish space permitted at least a brief review of the violent manifestations of popular hostility to the lawyer, which have characterized periods of upheaval and transition in the past. Revolutionary forces in England, from Jack Cade down, usually sought first to kill the lawyers. They were a conspicuous target in the French Revolution. Many of the men who won independence for the American colonies and established the new republic urged seriously that liberty would not be secure unless, as a primary step, the legal profession was suppressed or abolished. If the initiative and referendum had been available in those days, the forces of hostility to the lawyers, led by men like John Adams, would probably have swept the colonies with a favorable vote on such a proposal. The moral enthusiasts who agitated the slavery question until they forced it as a political issue, were loud in their arraignment of lawyers as the champions of a lawyermade Constitution which protected property rights in human beings. They were utterly unable to foresee the time just ahead when a lawyer President and a Cabinet which shared with him the leadership of the American Bar would issue an Emancipation Proclamation and guide the Nation to a sound solution of its greatest problem. Ex-President Taft saw the situation clearly a decade ago. The legal profession was "more or less on trial" then, and is so to-day, and no better tribute could be paid to the pivotal position of the legal profession in the world of affairs, than to say that it is, always has been, and always will be "more or less on trial" in any period of progress and accomplishment.

My topic, however, deals with the present developments of the law as a profession, not with past criticism of it; but if you wish to get a better perspective as to the present, you need only to read such works as Charles Warren's "History of the American Bar," Mr. Beveridge's "Life of John Marshall," Charles Francis Adams' "Three Episodes of Massachusetts History," certain of the novels of Charles Dickens, or Pollock and Maitland's "History of English Law." I wish, however, in passing, to submit to you this pertinent observation, and to invite your consideration of its accuracy and of the reasons for its truth:

In the present period of radical, and in some respects revolutionary, change, in the United States as throughout the world, there seems to be less of denunciation and criticism of the lawyers than in any similar period of our history.

If this statement is true, and my reading of the annals of the Bar convinces me that it is, then I suggest that it may be explained only by a conclusion that, in the past ten or twenty years of transition, the

lawyers of America have, to at least an unusual degree, adapted themselves to the changed conditions, have met the changing requirements, have helped to guide the transition along constructive lines, have served as leaders of the forward-looking thought of the American people, and have been in no sense mere obstructionists or adherents of "things as they are."

My theme is along the lines of an amplification of the statement just made, particularly as to the changes which have taken place in the profession to enable its members to perform more acceptably their traditional tasks. I am aware that I am venturing into a field where it is dangerous to try to generalize. What I shall try to sketch are types and tendencies which seem to me to represent the prevailing trend. They are by no means universal in application or realization. Many will promptly point out that the changes to which I refer have not yet taken place everywhere and have not been fully realized anywhere. Nevertheless, some discussion of the trend of these re-adjustments may be of interest.

In the first place, let us look the facts in the face as to the legal profession as it was, and as to the changes now in progress in the profession under the pressure of economic and social readjustments. Who and what was the lawyer down to a comparatively recent time? Too commonly he had selected and entered the profession, not because of superior cultural training or any moral training at all, but because he had early manifested a certain readiness in argument and smartness in handling himself. The average parent on the farm and in the early industries aspired that the heritage of his sons should be something more than the physical toil of the pioneer. If a boy was alert, smart, glib, and showed an early aversion to manual labor, this was thought to fit him for the law.

Too often these preliminary qualifications were all the boy possessed, and there was no weeding-out process at all. If he wished to become a member of the Bar, there was no obstacle to prevent the attainment of his desire. The reading of a few law books, a motion before the court, an available desk in a lawyer's office in exchange for menial or clerical services, and the youth of nimble wit was a member of the Bar, ready to receive clients and ready to begin his legal education at their expense! The young men of the law schools, who often feel that present-day educational requirements prevent the young lawyer from beginning practice as early in life as was formerly the case, overlook the fact that, in the pioneer days, the lawyer's education in his profession too commonly began with his admission to the Bar. Nowadays the graduate of a college and law school is

much further along in his professional development when he is admitted to the Bar; and this fact is increasingly, though tardily, recognized in the rates of compensation paid to the newcomers in the profession.

During the earlier years of the American Bar, the conditions precedent to admission were only an index or reflex of the conditions subsequent. The practice of the law was principally a matter of appearing for one side or the other in neighborhood disputes. It dealt with the heartaches, the pettiness and the avarice of mankind, and the lawyer's spear knew no brother. Law suits were looked upon as a duel of wits, a game, to be played sharply and savagely. It was the era of what Dean Wigmore has called "the sporting theory of justice." The premium was put on cunning, trickiness, and skill in what came to be known as pettifogging. The young lawyer rarely had received any training or guidance which would teach him any other philosophy of the profession. The Bar had not even begun to marshal its forces to teach initiates any other precepts.

The lawyer lived on local controversies, the disagreements of neighbors, the grasping and acquisitorial designs of the more unscrupulous. Because discord and dissension prospered him, the lawyer often gave grounds for John Adams' charge that "he foments more quarrels than he composes, and enriches himself at the expense of impoverishing others more honest and deserving than himself.” The idea that a lawyer might avert trouble and dissension, make human affairs run more smoothly and prosperously, and be a creative and constructive factor in the business life of the community, was almost unknown.

The average lawyer knew less of business than he did of the law and professional ethics. Business men felt that the great tragedy of their lives was any circumstance which compelled contact with lawyers and litigation. Laws were casually framed and casually interpreted, in each jurisdiction. To try to carry on business in more than one state involved the business man in a labyrinth of uncertainty and conflicting rules. Even as to the most common forms of business transactions, the law varied widely from state to state a variance which destroyed certainty as to legal rights. This deplorable condition was created by the lawyers of that day, and was often, I fear, deliberately perpetuated by them. The difficulties to which it gave rise constituted a part of their stock in trade, their means of livelihood.

The law was then the ready stepping-stone to politics; hence most lawyers went into public office, carrying with them much of the point