XIV PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION, JANUARY 17, 1920 GENTLEMEN OF THE BAR ASSOCIATION AND OUR GUESTS: I first wish to express my high appreciation of the honor of being your president. I have valued the distinction and the opportunities of the office. I lay it down with a higher idea of the usefulness and the possibilities of the Association. To our guests we extend a warm welcome. I especially greet the ladies. The solace of having them at our side we know. We men are now concerned lest we may not get them on our side. The times are full of matters of interest to lawyers. Some we mention with hesitation. Last year we debated the League of Nations, and, as Judge Hughes said at our last dinner, "no fatality resulted." I am not sure that a debate now would be equally free from casualties. Another condition I forbear to enlarge upon. Our friend Mr. Wadhams, usually optimistic, feared that it might have a withering effect upon the joy of this occasion. Your numbers, however, belie his forebodings. Perhaps it is because lawyers believe as Wordsworth would have put it: "The good die first, And they whose throats are dry as summer dust The war has brought the political, social and industrial affairs of the world into an abnormal state of un rest. In Russia the revolt against the old order cannot be dismissed with the formula that her people should work out their own salvation, because its psychological effect has permeated far beyond Russia itself. The Bolshevists proclaim to the world that ordered liberty, as the rest of the world understands it, is a mere gesture or metaphor; that freedom of speech and of the press, the equal protection of the laws, the right to assemble and to petition the government, the prohibition of unreasonable searches, seizures, and cruel and unusual punishments, and the safeguarding of life, liberty or property by due process of law, merely facilitate the infliction of injustice. They would substitute the despotism of the proletariat over every other class, the subversion of all freedom, morality and religion, and they would contemptuously reject patriotism and love of country as a moral force. But the most amazing thing is that they seek to perpetuate their rule, not by the consent of the governed, but by the will of a small minority sustained by force. Lenin himself has boasted that control of 180,000,000 of people is in the hands of not more than 200,000 industrial workers in the cities. This is made possible by giving the Red Army extraordinary privileges in the material things of life, and by vesting in them eight times the political power of the industrial workers in the city and eighty times that of the peasants who constitute 90 per cent. of the population. This rule of the minority was accomplished not so much by military force as by industrial strikes. The new possibilities in the use of that weapon have no doubt had a psychological relation to certain phases of recent strikes in other parts of the world. In England the coal strike and the railroad strike struck at the very life of the British people, who had to unite in self-protection to avoid the terrible effects of a fuel famine and of the paralysis of the transportation system. The police strike in London threatened to overthrow law and order. The Boston police strike was a similar movement, of which Governor Coolidge truly said: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody anywhere at any time." The coal strike here became a matter of national concern, not because the employers were illegally threatened by loss, but because the vital necessities of the public compelled them to become a party to a controversy in which they had no other concern. Our great business combinations, the interlocking of our essential industries, their interdependence and the far-reaching effect of an interference with the functioning of any of their parts, make a great strike to-day of far greater moment than at any time in our history. Whether a check in our industrial life result from the unreasonable, selfish or arbitrary policy of employers, or from the ill-considered or tyrannous action of the employees, in either case it tends to deprive the people of the right to pursue happiness in their own way, and our government ceases to derive its "powers from the consent of the governed," but from the dictation of a group. No one now denies the right of industrial workers to unite to better their condition. But if in increasing their participation in the profits and management of industries they do not avoid excessive and unreasonable resort to strikes, we shall come perilously near a condition where minorities and not majorities rule. Another subject engages the attention of the public. We are in a maelstrom of constitutional agitation. |