SECOND DAY, MORNING SESSION Friday, July 7, 1899 The Association resumed its sessions at 10 o'clock A. M., President Woodward in the chair. THE PRESIDENT: Gentlemen of the Bar Association: Your attention is now requested to the Annual Address, on the subject "Some Legal Problems of the Twentieth Century." I introduce to you the Honorable William B. Hornblower, of New York. SOME LEGAL PROBLEMS OF THE BY HON. WILLIAM B. HORNBLOWER Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I regard an invitation from the Bar of a sister State to address them at their annual meeting, in the light of a command. An invitation from the Bar Association of Pennsylvania has an especial obligation, for I am not altogether an alien or a stranger in this Commonwealth. Although by birth a Jerseyman, and of New Jersey and Connecticut lineage, it so happened that I cast my first vote as a citizen of Pennsylvania. My father spent the last twelve years of his life as a professor in the Western Theological Seminary at Allegheny-twelve happy, useful and honored years. When I came of age I was residing with him in Allegheny, and I was thus a citizen of this Commonwealth. When I had completed my law studies in New York City I seriously contemplated returning to practice my profession in the City of Pittsburg. I thus feel towards the Bar of Pennsylvania as a married woman feels towards the man whom she almost married and whose career she follows with a peculiar interest. When your secretary wrote to me some few weeks ago demanding the title of my address, I was somewhat at a loss how to answer him, but finally hit upon the title of "Legal Problems of the Twentieth Century"; but lest you should think me too far-reaching, I limited the title to "Some Legal Problems of the Twentieth Century," thus disclaiming any attempt to cover the whole field. The dawn of the new Century is close at hand. But one more full year remains of the Nineteenth Century. As every thoughtful man, at the end of each calendar year, is led to reflect upon the events of the preceding twelve months, to consider how far he has succeeded and wherein he has failed of success and also to look forward to the coming year and to plan the future conduct of his affairs, so at the close of a century the people of a nation naturally look back upon the results of the closing century and look forward to the possibilities of the coming century. To us in this country it is especially proper that we should pause to reflect upon the past and to look forward to the future. We suddenly find ourselves confronted by new conditions and charged with new duties and responsibilities. We are thus led to inquire seriously what we, of the present generation, shall be called upon to meet and to deal with in the shape of problems to be solved. Especially are we of the Bar of this country summoned to look forward and to prepare ourselves for the responsibilities which must, of necessity, be thrown upon us, for it is upon the Bar of this country, from the days of Hamilton and Jefferson to the present day, that the main burden has fallen of guiding the destinies of the State and of the Nation, not only in the strict domain of jurisprudence, but in the fields of statesmanship, diplomacy and constitutional development. In looking back over the century now drawing to a close, it is somewhat disheartening to consider how few problems we can be truthfully said to have solved and how many have been solved for us, and one might even say, in spite of us. The slavery problem, for instance, was not solved by 1 any well devised scheme for immediate or gradual abolition or by any carefully considered compromise between the opposing forces, but by the rude, clumsy, costly and ghastly process of a terrible civil war. The race problems, resulting from and growing out of the abolition of slavery, are still open problems after nearly thirty-five years of experience with the situation. Nothing is settled, except that the attempt to settle these problems by the 14th Amendment, by Civil Rights Bills and by Force Bills are absolute failures. The financial problems, growing out of the Civil War and out of an inflated currency and out of the discrepancy between the values of the gold and the silver dollar, have never been manfully and scientifically grappled with by Congress. With the single exception of the Resumption Act, which did resume specie payments, we have drifted back and forth on the sea of financial legislation, endeavoring to obtain peace by compromise between two inconsistent theories, and to reconcile the irreconcilable. Our Bland Act and our Sherman Act were either a weak yielding to the clamoring of financial heretics or a half-way and an unsatisfactory concession to the true gospel of financial salvation, according to the point of view of the observer. But from either point of view they were utterly worthless and worse than worthless, as steps toward a solution of the currency problem. Our experience in the past has bred in us an optimism which threatens to result in a happy-go-lucky policy with a feeling that we shall come out all right somehow in the end. Providence has been good to us, and we assume that Providence has us under its special care, and will continue to be good to us in the future. It behooves us, however, to be modest, or at least not too over confident as to the future. The old proverb that "Providence helps them that help themselves" may be still in force. We have a right to congratulate ourselves thus far upon our good fortune, and we have a right also to congratulate ourselves that we have, in |