Page images
PDF
EPUB

ANNUAL ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE ILLINOIS STATE BAR ASSOCIATION, AT CHICAGO, JULY 11, 1901

JESSE HOLDOM, PRESIDENT.

Since this Association last met the Nineteenth century has closed and the dawn of the Twentieth century has been ushered in upon a waiting and expectant world.

The Queen Empress, who gave her name to an era which is distinguished for achievements of mighty import for all things that humanize and civilize our race, has passed through that portal to the mystic beyond through which all alike travel on an equality. What mighty strides has this Nineteenth century made. It encompassed the great Victorian era, the most luminous for progress of recorded time.

The Eighteenth century closed with the death of Washington and the Nineteenth opened with the induction of John Marshall into the chamber of the Federal Supreme Court as Chief Justice.

It is not much more than seventy years since the little locomotive "Rocket" initiated transportation by rail on a railroad of but a few miles in length, while today 466,000 miles of railroad are in active operation the world around. These have cost about forty thousand millions of dollars, and of them 190,000 miles, costing ten thousand millions of dollars, are to be found in our country.

Our own Fulton is admittedly the father of steam naviga

PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL ADDRESS.

tion, and in 1809 the first steamboat ever successfully operated was launched upon American waters. Fulton also designed and built the first war steamer, which he called "Fulton the First." She was built in 1814, was 2,475 tons, steamed outside Sandy Hook the Fourth of July, 1815, running a distance of fifty-three miles in eight hours and twenty minutes. She was never put in commission, but was used as a training ship and accidentally blew up June 4, 1829. The first ship propelled by steam to cross the Atlantic ocean was the "Savannah," built in New York in 1818. She left Savannah, Ga., for Liverpool May 26, 1819, and reached her destination in twentyfive days, using steam eighteen days. In rough weather her paddles were taken in on deck-a task performed in thirty minutes. What strides have been made in steam navigation since the days of the Savannah! At the present time one may eat his dinner in London on the evening of the sixth day after leaving New York harbor on board one of the modern greyhounds of the Atlantic.

The invention by Morse of the transmission of messages by wire is within the memory of many of the older members of this Association, and to the middle aged it seems but a few years since Bell and Gray perfected the telephone and Edison gave to the world the soft, bright incandescent light of electricity. Just before the Civil war, Cyrus W. Field laid the first Atlantic cable, which parted at sea and was lost, but nothing daunted, he again perfected submarine connection between this country and the British isles, and now the seas and oceans of the world are threaded with the silent message bearer, through which by lightning flash the events from the Arctic to the antipodes and all over the globe are instantly communicated.

In this age of progress when the agriculturist has turned from the flail to the threshing machine and from the sickle to the reaper of modern invention; when sanitation has reached its present state of perfection; when the wheels of

JESSE HOLDOM.

the factory are kept revolving by mechanical device-the outcome of the inventive ingenuity of our people; when travel by land and water is accomplished by steam and electricity in oriental luxury and ease; when anaesthetics with modern surgery ease pain and save human life; when even the clergy in this maelstrom of evolution have abolished Hades and lessened the terrors of the evils which were wont to be indulged as afflicting the immortal part of man after animation here has ceased, for his so-called sins of omission and commission; with our free schools and universities on broad foundations of learning with ample financial resources accessible to rich and poor alike; with free libraries in all the modern cities; with law schools so varied in their curriculum and character that one may be a carpenter or a blacksmith, a dry goods clerk or a soda water fountain attendant by day and a student of law in the leisure hours of the evening, let us consider what improvement and advance have been attained in the administration and practice of the law during the past century!

We started the century with comparatively few text books nearly all of which were written by English authors; of reports there were but twenty-one volumes covering the decisions of American Courts of Review, and the judiciary and the lawyers reinforced their legal knowledge by recourse to the English reports, while today there are 4,261 volumes containing the reports and decisions of Federal and State Courts of dernier resort and 387 volumes of reports of courts of intermediate appellate jurisdiction, including the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. There are of statutes, codes, the existing reporter systems, digests, encyclopedias, annotations, text books and legal literature in general circulation about 4,850 volumes. If our legal brethren at the commencement of the century were hindered by lack of legal literature, they certainly had adequate time to study and reason from basic principles, while their successors of today are simply overwhelmed at the embarrassment of written law and reported

PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL ADDRESS.

cases confronting them, with but little time to intelligently extract from this unwieldy mass the true legal principle applicable to the case in hand. It is a dull student of the law who cannot now find from the myriad of reported cases a decision by some court apparently in point on any given legal proposition. The rapid increase of legal literature is growing to be, if it is not already, a serious menace to the profession and a grave problem which may need genius and perhaps drastic treatment to efficiently solve.

The whole legal fabric of England during the Nineteenth century underwent a complete and radical change-starting with the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1852-4 and finally terminating with the re-arrangement of the practice and procedure and the whole judicial system under the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, whereby ancient common law and chancery pleading have been abolished and by which it is now expressly provided and is the uniform rule of judicial interpretation "that when the rules of the common law conflict with those of equity every court is to give effect to the latter." This departure from ancient precedent by a people so conservative with a fixed reputation of changing existing methods with much reluctance, was but following an example set by the law makers of America. David Dudley Field, the eminent New York lawyer, was the pioneer in advocacy of codification and largely as the result of his indefatigable labors New York in 1848 engrafted into its laws the code of "Civil Procedure," since which time many of the states have adopted codes similar in purpose and effect. The main object of the codes adopted in some of the states and of the English Judicature Acts has been the simplification of procedure and practice and the virtual amalgamation of law and equity and the abolishing of the fictions of common law pleading. Not only did David Dudley Field's work result in formulating laws for the regulation and guidance of many of the courts of the commonwealths of this republic, but many of the most salient provis

JESSE HOLDOM.

ions of the New York "Code of Civil Procedure" are enacted into the Judicature Act of England. These have again been extended to, and adopted by, many of the British colonies and are followed by the Consular Courts of Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. These are accomplishments creditable to the genius of the American lawyer, although I am aware that the Bar of Illinois, or at least its older members, do not regard code practice and procedure as lying along the lines of true law reform or as tending to the advancement of jurisprudence. Be that as it may, such reforms have proven beneficial and acceptable to millions of people and to the bench and bar of many countries. Yet at this day codification of the laws may be regarded in the light of legal renaissance, for the earliest elaborate systems of laws of which we have any authentic knowledge were contained in codes such as the Gregorian code, Hermogenian code, Justinian code, King Alfred's code, sometimes regarded as the foundation of the common law in England-Burgundian code-not forgetting the Code Napoleon compiled in the early years of the past century, many of the provisions of which are still embodied in the civil laws of Louisiana.

Napoleon is said to have entertained greater pride for his code than for his victorious battles. This can be readily understood, for while his battles in time will cease to interest, yet the beneficial effects of his code will be continuously emphasized in their application to the welfare and interests of life, liberty and property of millions of people. An English code champion recently said in discussing the subject: "To speak plain truths, pleadings are sometimes a kind of legal decoy duck and most frequently serve the sole purpose of affording agreeable material for the exercise of the scientific skill and ingenuity of the lawyers. Many unfortunate litigants have discovered too late that the pleadings were the attractive bait that drew them on to a senseless trial.

*

*

« PreviousContinue »