It has rather been the purpose to call your attention to some abuses that ought to have statutory regulation. Some of the things criticized have had the sanction of the courts, but that does not make them right, and you can do a real service to the public if you will bring about a condition that will prevent commissions and courts from looking at questions before them, almost wholly from the viewpoint of utilities. There is no more serious question before the public today than this question of rate regulation, and we, as lawyers, will not discharge our duty to the public unless we do what we can to aid in the proper development of the theory and regulation of rate making.

Our Place in the Sun

SAMUEL R. ALDEN, Ft. Wayne.

Sooner or later on life's highway, most thoughtive human beings meet that old disturber of peace of mind, “Cui Bono".

Some buoyed on the wings of religious faith evade the contest, but many come to grips. Of these some are beaten in the struggle and drift through life as mental and moral weaklings and cripples, while the majority fight to a draw and pass on fitter for life's contests and make good.

The members of our profession, after years of worldly success, frequently are troubled by the same question as applied to the promotion of justice.

We see many suits won and win some ourselves that we feel are unjustly decided. We see the community fleeced by unscrupulous members of our own guild and, to the public delight, we see lawyers mulcted in cash and in reputation: some justly, because they robbed their clients, and some unjustly-simply because they are lawyers.

It is common experience in many communities that the most certainly convicting evidence before a jury is the fact of defendant's being a lawyer; and be he never so clean and upright, his very benefactions may by shrewd manipulation be turned against him.

Because of public prejudice he is subject to blackmail or, as the alternative, expensive litigation.

We know of social and business tigers and jackals being guided around the traps of justice by sharp nosed legal foxes. We see crime exulting in its ability to escape pun

ishment through cash, pull, ingenious efforts of our own members and an out-of-date procedure.

We help our clients take advantage of the law's delay when that is our chief defense; but, when that same delay is their undoing, we are helpless to prevent its injustice.

Under political stress or money hunger, we advocate causes and principles adopted for the occasion without personal consideration and judgment, or worse yet against our own belief, because employed or politically aligned on that side.

The aftertaste of success in such efforts is bitter.

Is it strange that when, induced by hard bumps or thinking leisure, we are led to ponder on the little we contribute to the amelioration of life's troubles, we feel the administration of justice a failure and cry out "Cui bono", What's the use!

Within a few hundred years after the birth of our profession among the Romans, notwithstanding the first authorized advocates were required to give their aid without pay in the settlement of disputes, advocacy became rotten and the profession little better than a band of thieves.

Singularly, lawyers were unknown at and for thousands of years after the compilation of the first great body of law, the Code of Ahmurabi, promulgated about 3500 years B. C.

But in construction of the next great code, over 4000 years later, the best lawyers of the Roman Empire played an important part, especially in making the Digests (Pandects), Institutes, and later compilations other than the Novels, and their work today is the foundation of continental codes and systems as well as a small part of the English and American law.

Since the Code Justinian whether, in making of codes, elementary treaties similar in purpose to the institutes, or text books and digests, lawyers have done the work and had the credit, and some of them, as Blackstone and Kent, acquired a competence thereby.

Much of their work has been helpful to humanity. To such as Hamilton and Jefferson this nation owes the strength of its framework, to such as Seward and Lincoln it owes the bracing of that framework against cyclonic internal disruption, and to many on the bench and at the bar the world is indebted for clean, clear, sweet views of human relation and their enforcement.

A review of the brief period of our professional life shows much improvement in our later activities, and we may well have courage yet awhile to strive for our place in the sun, viz.: our leadership of worldly activity acknowledged and welcomed by the world, our clientele.

That may seem like boastful assumption; but let us see. Under modern forms of government, promoted largely by our profession, the ruler, by whatever name, is no longer supreme in dictating and controlling the relations of the citizens, their lives and property, and hence the field is open for exercise of the lawyer's license or privilege, i. e., helping the members of the human family individually, or as greater or lesser aggregates, to attain and enjoy their rights as such. This privilege or license, whether arising by custom, statute or acquiescence, is today conceded our profession.

Unfortunately some of our fraternity and a considerable per cent of the public still cherish the delusion that to the lawyer has been accorded license to aid in the commission of wrongs and suppression of rights, and even in the

known criminal's escape from deserved punishment, making opportunity for continued offenses.

This known delusion, aided by all too frequent violations of our privilege by members of our profession and our darker history in the remote past, is doubtless responsible for the apparently general, and, in many communities, certainly widespread suspicion of us.

This lack of public confidence and esteem in which our profession is held is fixed, and radical action will be necessary to overcome it.

As a consequence of the privilege by the public given us to act for its members, singly or grouped, in attaining and enjoying their rights, the corresponding duty to the public is imposed on us to see that we are each reasonably fit for such service, that we furnish it when requested, and that we scrupulously observe the limits of our license. Fitness for the service means educated capacity, moral and mental, with physical power to run the machine and ready human sympathy to save friction.

While the school and college are useful, work is essential even when abounding capacity is present. We have had one American example of perfect fitness for legal service-Abraham Lincoln-and he never had a year's schooling.

He was second to none in the clearness of his mental and moral vision and quickness of his human sympathy, and he followed his own advice-"to work, work, work!" and he tried to obey the highest mandate of Confucius and Christ "Do unto others as you would that they should do to you!" What was the result? He was easily first in the ordinary legal forum, and in the great world forum of statesmanship his figure was and is, and ever will be commanding.