origin in a deep and widespread, and I regret to think, a growing impatience and distrust of the law-a dissatisfaction with its force in general and its adequacy in particular cases, an impatience with its procedure and a distrust of its enforcement.

I propose to ask your attention to some considerations on the special responsibilities of the legal profession in this regard.

Even the most hideous blot on American civilization, murder by lynching with all its dreadful accompaniments, springs from the same source, the feeling of men not of the criminal classes that crime has been done which calls for swift and exemplary punishment, that the law is slow and worse than that uncertain, and therefore, men not criminals themselves in intent refuse to wait for the law, and commit crime in the name and for the purpose of justice. It is stated that from 1890 to 1895, inclusive, there were 43,902 homicides committed in the United States, and in the same period 723 legal executions, and 1118 lynchings (article by Hon. I. C. Parker, U. S. D. C., Arkansas, in 162 No. Am. Rev., 667), and from a report of the Attorney-General of the United States to Congress it appears that the homicides for a single year were 10,500 and for the vast slaughter represented by that figure, in round numbers but 100 were convicted by the courts, and 240 were executed by lynch law. I have not seen this report and am forced to take the figures at second hand from an opinion by Mr. Justice CLARK, of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, in State vs. Rhyne, 33 S. E. Rep., 135. In the same opinion, Justice CLARK, speaking from the official criminal statistics, puts the average number of homicides in his state at "125 per annum, for which on an average two are executed by law and four are lynched, though doubtless all the lynchings are not reported." In April of this present year the Hon. George Hillyer, ex-mayor of Atlanta, and a former judge of the Superior Court of Georgia, reporting on crime and lynchings to the State Baptist convention, said that in 1896 there were more men murdered than fell at Gettysburg, and

more than were killed to the present date in Cuba and the Philippines together.

In the face of these awful figures must we not confess that our criminal law is pitifully weak in dealing with this highest phase of crime, and admit with shame the reproach of American indifference to security of life? Let us not here in Pennsylvania flatter ourselves with our immunity from the worst forms of lawlessness. We have been happily free from murderous lynchings, owing no doubt principally to the absence of those social and racial conditions which lie at the root of the vast majority of such murders, partly to the calmer temperament of our people, and partly, let us say with pardonable pride, to the firmer administration of the law. But we have not been without dangerous intimations, in common with our neighboring States, that the spirit of impatience and distrust was rife, and liable to break out upon any occasion specially calling forth popular passion. The light of the blazing court house in Cincinnati in 1884 was a beacon to warn us that lawlessness in the cause of law is not always confined by boundaries of latitude and geography.

Though our immediate concern therefore is with the less ferocious aspects of the subject, yet it is the same subject, with a common origin, and it behooves us, ministers of the law, to consider the evil and our especial duties in regard to the remedy.

For the making of the laws we are in some degree accountable. In every American legislature lawyers are a large and influential element in the shaping of legislation, but in the judicial administration of the law they are controlling, and it is of this that I desire to speak.

And first of that time-honored subject of jest and fling, from Shakespeare down, the law's delay. The great mass of the community condemn the law unsparingly in this regard, and though it is somewhat blindly done and not always justly, yet it has a basis of justification. It is right, as well as necessary, that the law should move deliberately, but it should not be leaden-heeled. My subject to-day deals only