THE PRESIDENT: The Association will be in order. The Divine Invocation will be pronounced by the Reverend Alexander McFerran.

DIVINE INVOCATION

We thank Thee, our Father, for the opening of this beautiful day, and for the coming together of this assemblage of men, who are bound together in the common warfare of life. We pray Thee that Thou shalt bind them more closely together. Bless these men, we pray Thee, as they represent the State in their chosen profession. Guide them in their efforts to elevate the principles of justice, peace, and prosperity. May Thy blessing upon this Association be of benefit to all of its members. We pray Thee that the love of Jesus Christ, and the love of God who is the Father of all, shall abide within us. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen.

THE PRESIDENT: The address of welcome will be delivered by Major John F. Lacey, of the local bar.

MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY: Gentlemen of the Bar: It is a pleasant and useful custom that brings you together in these annual meetings, and the people of this city appreciate the honor of having you in our midst. You are more than welcome, and we tender to you the sincere hospitality of our goodly city.

Your meeting is social in a great degree and where you get together, you become your own entertainers. Members of the bar learn to know and appreciate one another as in no other profession.

In one hard-fought case you meet each other as adversaries and learn to appreciate one another from the other side, or, rather, from the outside. In the next one, perhaps, you are employed on the same side of a cause and are admitted to the very heart of each others' confidence, and learn to know each other from the inside; and that view of a former opponent is always a much more pleasing one than from the attitude of professional hostility. In this gathering you are all on the same side and from the same standpoint of social fraternity I know you will enjoy the friendly reunion.

In the old days when we traveled upon the circuit horseback, and with perhaps one or two books in the saddle bag, every court was a bar meeting, and the judge of the court was the presiding officer, and at those gatherings the farmer boy, coming to town on some errand, would drop into the court room to hear the trial then in progress, and to listen to and witness the combat between the leaders of the bar. The old days when jury, grandjury, witnesses, and such as could spare the time gathered during court week to hear and witness the clash of arms between the traveling leaders of the bar have gone by, never to return. The proceedings of the courts have ceased to be centers of amusement. The present generation does not even know what it is missing. The friendly relations and pleasant intercourse among leaders of the bar, over wide regions, brought to the profession a compensation much more worthy of the seeking than the mere financial rewards of the present day.

When Blackhawk, in the days of his later life, spoke of the early days along the rivers of Illinois; of the game, the wild fruits, and the fruitful patches of corn and gardens, he exclaimed in the fullness of his heart: "These were the days that were!" We revive the memories and those days to some degree by these friendly meetings of the men who love their profession well enough to gather from all parts of the State to exchange and fraternize for a day or two.

In after life we always look back with pleasure to any place at which we may have had a good time, and our people especially hope that among these recollections you will recall the meeting of your Association at Oskaloosa in 1911. But your meeting will be in vain, after all, if it is only to be remembered for its pleas

ures.

The bar represents a great conservative force in our national life. Our government with its three coördinate branches: the executive, the legislative, and judicial, must look largely to an upright and honorable bar to maintain the respect of the public to the judicial branch of the structure. It has long been one of the pleasantries among lawyers that when you are not satisfied with a decision that the proper course is to "appeal or go down to the tavern and swear at the court".

Now it is proposed that a more effective method would be to circulate a petition for the recall of the judge and hold this in terrorem over the judicial head when each decision is made. Each judicial judgment in an important case would involve the likelihood of an immediate reference of the case to the popular judgment of the voters in a recall election in which the parties and counsel on the losing side would not fail to participate. Would self-respecting lawyers seek or accept burdens or honor of judicial office upon such conditions? Aristides was banished from Athens upon a popular vote, because the Athenians had grown "tired of hearing him called the just". We get a chance at our judges every four years in Iowa, under our present laws; that is quite a short period as it is. The bar has always been brave enough to do its duty, even in behalf of an unpopular client. Judges have had the manhood to stand up against the demands of the executive on the one hand, or the people on the other, in making decisions that they believed to be in accordance with the law, whether popular or not. It is easy to make a popular decision: it costs no effort to float with the tide. A judge is responsible rather for the uprightness than the rightness of his decisions.

The common law, or, as we more properly term it, the "judgemade law", is after all the foundation of our valued rights. A judicial decision, where there is no statute to control it, is "judge

made law", but the court must give a reason for its action. On the other hand, a statute needs to give no reason for its enactment: it is the incarnation of physical and political force. The common law is the incarnation of reason and the result of long lines of judicial interpretation made by wise men trained in the law, and whose ripened judgment is accepted as authoritative by bench and bar, upheld by the people, because it is the great conserver of their private and political rights. The richest heritage that we have received from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors is the common law. There is an old saying among lawyers that a good lawyer ought to be ashamed not to be able to give a fairly accurate opinion upon a question of common law, even if asked upon the street; but that any good lawyer should be ashamed to give an opinion upon statute law without having the statute before him. His reason teaches him as to the common law. As to the statutes, memory is the only, but an unsafe, guide. After all, the reason of the law is the strength of the law.

Changes in the law are the proper subjects of discussion in an Association of this kind, but lawyers do not favor changes for change sake alone. Experience in the past is the lamp which illuminates the proper course in the future. The true test of a law is, "How has it worked?" Wise, conservative, and reasonable changes in existing laws are among the most fitting subjects for your discussion and consideration, but no gathering of lawyers will favor changes in the laws where good and sound results have been obtained by their enforcement in the past.

The French philosophers held that history consisted more in warnings than in models. To the bar it is full of both. The pilot was bragging that he knew every rock in the channel, "and there is one of them now', he said, as the vessel struck.

Warnings are useful, but, after all, good models are the most valuable. It has been said of the churches that people who are ashamed of their religion have good reason to be. We may well say the same of lawyers. But, my brethren of the bar, it is not my duty to make a general address on this occasion.

I am told to bid you welcome this morning. People always remember any town, any city, any place in which they have a good time. We want you to have a good time at Oskaloosa; we

feel assured that you will do so, because you are your own entertainers, and you are first class entertainers of one another. You can swap your stories here, and they will be brand new when you get back to Garnavillo, or Des Moines, or Guthrie Center, or Montezuma. And that is one of the pleasant things of these reunions. You cannot go on the circuit any more, but you can meet annually at the Bar Associations and talk over the present, and live for a time in the past, and with your faces towards the future and full of hope, believe that the future will be at least as good as the past has been, and certainly that would be very satisfying to the great majority.

Now, one and all, I bid you welcome to Oskaloosa.

THE PRESIDENT: The response to the address of welcome will be delivered by the Honorable C. A. Carpenter, of Columbus Junetion.

C. A. CARPENTER: Mr. President and Members of the Bar Association: I esteem it a great honor to be commissioned by the Iowa State Bar Association to make response to the generous words and hearty welcome just pronounced by Major John F. Lacey, the dean of the Mahaska County Bar. The genuineness and fervor of Oskaloosa hospitality quite overwhelms us and in the hour and a half allotted for my response, I am sure I shall have difficulty in finding words adequate to fully express the feelings of the Bar.

Then too, Mr. President, you must be aware that up to the time that we received assurance of welcome from Major Lacey's lips, we had no certain means of knowing just what our reception would be. Many a man has stepped upon a promising situation only to have it fly up and hit him in the face, and being in a state of uncertainty, we have neglected to dust off the dictionary and search for the words out of which to construct a fairly appropriate speech of appreciation. But now that our welcome has been so warmly assured, we can only exclaim, "This is so sudden!"

To fully appreciate my position, you must go back with me to the time I received from the Program Committee the invitation to respond to an address of welcome that I had never yet had the