The observations which I have to offer are not those of a student of political science, but of a practicing lawyer, whose duties occasionally bring him before committees of the legislature and whose calling gives him opportunity to notice the practical working of legislative acts.

I fear that before this audience I shall appear in the character of Molière's Bourgeois Gentil homme—announcing discoveries of facts astonishing only to myself, and engaged in the somewhat useless task of “carrying coals to Newcastle.”

I shall confine myself to the consideration of State, as distinguished from national legislation.

As a preface, I call your attention to certain familiar propositions.

The law which governs us is to be found in the constitutions of the United States and of the States, treaties made by authority of the United States, the statutes enacted by the national and State legislatures and the common law.

The common law is the expression of those rules of conduct, which, after long experience, have been found by the courts, to be just in the greatest number of cases. Its principles are readily adaptable to the vast majority of new judicial problems arising from changed conditions and, with exceptions much more rare than legislators imagine, it is safe to allow the courts to work out relief under, and in harmony with, its well established doctrines.