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the abolition of slavery, by nevertheless invoking upon it, as upon an act of highest import and far-reaching consequences, "the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

Nearly a year after the close of the war, and three years after the proclamation of emancipation, the Constitution, becoming aware of the destruction of slavery, conformed its language to the decree of the unwritten Constitution, and by the thirteenth amendment expressed this great change in the national life.

I shall not dwell upon the legal tender cases. They seem like an echo of the din of the civil war and of the chaos of reconstruction, and confirm the view that the written Constitution. will, at the last, yield to the unwritten. Such submission is not to be referred to causes merely accidental or which might have been avoided. In a national crisis, the living, organic forces of the nation must prevail; the written law must conform or perish. To the behests of Alexander even the oracles of the gods bend obsequious.

The Electoral Commission of 1876 is a later instance, where through the creation for a special occasion of a tribunal to perform a duty constitutionally belonging to another body, the peace of the country was assured in an irregular, extra-constitutional way.

Many facts might be gathered from our history, I be lieve, to confirm the conclusion, that the Constitution of the United States is not all to be found in the writing which is commonly intended by that name. The Constitution of 1787, gathered under its shelter the incoherent forces which made the beginnings of our national life and attempted also to afford them room for expansion. From the nature of the case that instrument was somewhat of a guess as to the course their development would take the guess of statesmen, but still a forecast which the future did not altogether verify. These living forces, though in a state of constant flux and change, are usually in harmony with the Constitution, because by means of the executive and the legislature they themselves construe and apply it in all the business of the Nation; and even the judiciary has a constant bent toward construction in their sense, partly because of the urgency of national interests which must not be jeopardized, partly because influenced by the prevalent ideas of the day. Tempora patimur. We suffer the pressure of the time;

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and, in spite of themselves, judges try to make the Constitution conform to the spirit of their own generation. If it can not be made to do so, it must be mended or go its way.

Written constitutions are sometimes called rigid or inflexible. But a national constitution cannot be rigid and inflexible. The very notion involves a contradiction in terms; for a nation is a living organism, subject to continuous change in obedience to its own internal law of growth, and subject, too, to continuous modification by contact with other nations and with the material world. When, therefore, we say national constitution, we name something which bends and yields. I am not content, however, to say that a written constitution, if it would serve the purpose of a national constitution, must be flexible, not rigid; for it seems equally clear that a written constitution, however flexible, can never be the complete, the exhaustive expression of the life of a people, much less is it identical with that life. Experience shows that a written constitution may be ig nored, suspended, radically changed, superseded or overthrown, without destroying the national identity, or more than momentarily arresting the nation's onward course. In quiet times and under ordinary circumstances, the national life flows through the Constitution like a majestic river at peace, unceasingly but gently new shaping its banks; but if, a turbid torrent, it rage over all barriers and submerge all boundaries, who can say what its channel will be when its fury shall abate and its swollen waters subside? This, only the event can show, and the event will be its own justification; for whatever the nation does will be constitutional by the mere doing. Its decrees are not reversible for error, nor is it subject to impeachment. As it was said, you cannot draw an indictment against a whole people.

If one chose to represent the history of a people such as ours and the functions of its written and of its unwritten Constitution, he might do so in the form of a medal, of which the obverse would show the every day course of events under the figure of a judge administering justice from the tables of the law, with the legend: Ita lex scripta est; and the reverse should show some great crisis in its history under the effigy of Epaminondas at the altar adjuring the gods to witness, not that he had obeyed the laws, but that he had saved his country; and the legend: Salus populi suprema est lex. For so it is. The written Constitution declares itself and the laws made in pursuance of it to be the supreme law of the land; while the unwritten

Constitution owns allegiance to one supremest law-the salvation of the people.

Permit me to quote, upon the general question, the diametrically opposed opinions of two famous men, themselves the almost perfect opposites of one another-I mean Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Paine, as I have read, declared that a constitution cannot be said to exist so long as you are not able to put it in your pocket. Perhaps some of you, gentlemen, may favor Paine's view. For myself, I incline to that of Edmund Burke, who regarded "a nation as a great living society, and its constitution as no artificial scheme of government, but as an exquisite balance of social forces which is in itself a natural outcome of its history and development."

And here, gentlemen, one is tempted, instead of discreetly lapsing into silence, to speculate upon the lines which our Constitution, perhaps I should say our Constitutions, for I mean both of them,-will follow in its future development. "The star of empire" which "Westward took its way" some two centuries ago, has of late traveled so far to the West that it has penetrated the farthest East and crossed the line where sunset and sunrise meet. The field for conjecture is become boundless, but I forbear to enter it. It is enough that I have perhaps already deserved your censure by a very mistaken reading of the past. I shall risk no guess on the future. I draw the line at the "gratuitous error of prophecy."

ADDRESS

OF

ADLAI E. STEVENSON,

FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE

UNITED STATES.

THE LAWYER IN POLITICS.

I am honored by the invitation so cordially extended to address the Bar Association of Colorado at this hour. As a representative in Congress it was my privilege in the centennial to join in the welcome of this splendid commonwealth into the great sisterhood of states. What was then prophesied as to her future has been fulfilled. All that was predicted and promised for her then, time has more than made good. And now, her marvelous development and progress foreshadow the greatness that is yet to be hers. The wondrous achievements of the brief past are but the earnest of the glory that is yet to be.

To the Bar Association of Colorado I bring the fraternal greetings of your brethren in Illinois. We bid you God speed in the noble work of "advancing the science of jurisprudence; promoting the administration of justice; securing proper legislation; encouraging a thorough legal education; upholding the honor and dignity of the bar; cultivating cordial intercourse among lawyers; and perpetuating the history of the profession and the memory of its members."

To have borne even the humblest part in such accomplishment is worthy the loftiest ambition-is fitting reward for years. of professional toil.

The lawyer is a necessity in popular government. He is the preserver no less of liberty than of order. This was never more clearly expressed than by one whose memory all lawyers honor,

Rufus Choate, when he said: "The profession of the bar, in all political systems and in all times has possessed a two-fold nature; it has seemed to be fired by the spirit of liberty, and yet to hold fast the sentiments of order and reverence and the duty of subordination; it has resisted despotism and yet taught obedience; it has recognized and vindicated the rights of man, and yet has reckoned it among the most sacred and most precious of those rights to be shielded and led by the divine nature and immortal reason of law; that it appreciates social progression and contributes to it, and ranks with the agents of progression; yet evermore counsels and courts permanence and conservatism and rest; that it loves light better than darkness, and yet like the wise man in the old historian, has a habit of looking away as the night wanes, to the westward sky, to detect there the first streaks of returning dawn."

An eminent senator recently said: "The profession of the law is not a mere trade or calling-but a department of government." In an important sense, then, each American lawyer is an officebearer under our wondrous fabric of government. My words, then, are to

"You, who hold a nobler office upon the earth
Than arms, or power of brains, or birth,—
Could give the warrior kings of old."

Law as a profession is the necessary outgrowth of civilization. In his rude state man avenged his wrongs with his own strong arm, and the dogma "might makes right" passed unchallenged. But as communities assumed organic form rude tribunals. were instituted for the administration of justice and the maintenance of public order. The progress of society from a condition of barbarism, ignorance and superstition to a state of the highest culture and refinement, may be traced by its advancement in the modes of administering justice, and in the character and learning of its tribunals. The advance steps taken from time to time in the history of jurisprudence are the milestones which stand out on the highway of civilization. All along the pathway of human progress the courts of justice have been the true criteria by which to judge of the intelligence and the virtue of our race.

The common law was a grand inheritance from our Englishspeaking ancestors. In this respect, as in others, "America was the heir of all the ages." In the terse words of Emerson: "The nervous language of the common law, the impressive forms of

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