the worthy rival of the greatest lawyers of his time. In this field, as in every other, he was always enlisted on the side of public order, in support of the government and the preservation of the freedom and liberties of the people. He was a staunch and resolute defender of trial by jury. In his celebrated argument in support of a motion for a new trial in People vs. Creswell, he contended for the principles upon which has been builded the doctrine that truth may be justification in actions for libel, and the doctrine that the law and the fact are so blended in such cases that the determination of both falls within the province of the jury.

In the field of the law he was pre-eminent and original, but he never departed from the fundamental principles upon which society rests, and to which the rights and liberties of the people are anchored.

In the public mind, Hamilton's reputation rests upon his accomplishments as a financier, as the creator of the public credit, as the originator of the national bank and teacher of the American doctrine of economics. Any one of these achievements is enough to secure him immortal renown. But above and beyond these, in the Pantheon of Fame, will be written "Hamilton, the Creator of the Science of the Law of Written Constitutions; the Architect of the American States in Empire."

Let us not forget the fact that this man wrought in untried fields; that he was a pioneer in an undiscovered country, seeking the way to the largest individual freedom; seeking the unpolluted sources of a competent, popular government, republican in form; "a government of laws, not of men." To us the task seems com

monplace. The complex form of government adopted, and so successfully tested, seems simple. But the most complete legal and historical knowledge was required, the most ingenious, farseeing, inventive statesmanship was demanded and exercised in its conception. Constitutional government was not a growth; it was then the invention of legal genius.

Not that the Constitution was the product of any one man, or the theory of any one body of men; not that some constitution might not, at that time or some other time, have been adopted;

but, dealing with the situation as we find it, Hamilton was pre-eminent among the grandest galaxy of great, learned and able men that ny period of history furnishes, and his influence upon the science of constitutional law the most potent of all men. He created the science itself. Without the commanding power of judicial position, unsupported by judicial precedent, he wrought and spoke by the authority of truth and reason alone.

To the American lawyer has been committed the sacred trust of preserving this Constitution. He is the commissioned guide of governmental action. Upon no body of men has been imposed greater responsibilities, greater duties, more potent authority, than upon the lawyers of America. So long as American lawyers exercise their efforts to sustain and support the Constitution, cutting free from the entanglements and allurements of ambition, guided by the dictates of patriotic judgment and not led by the seductive influences of politics and partisan zeal; so long as they follow in the footsteps of the illustrious men who conceived and builded a government founded in law, the Constitution will live. But the tendency is evil; the atmosphere is laden with the resounding wail of discontent.

Lawyers! in your ranks and among those claiming to be your leaders are to be found the worst and the most contemptible demagogues of the era; worst, because they speak in the guise of ministers of justice, and with the apparent sanction of our high, honorable and ancient profession; contemptible, because they violate their oaths of office and besmirch the robes of justice. These men, self-seeking men, parasites upon the face of social order, preaching sectionalism, discontent, and indirectly the subversion of the fundamental principles of the Constitution, and the destruction of the inalienable right of every individual in society to exercise to its utmost his capacity to excel, to acquire and to enjoy, upon an equal footing with his countrymen, are weakening the fabric of our government. They are the ministers of demoralization. They are the sowers of the discontent now so prevalent. To them is attributable the fiction which is stinging the multitudes of labor into the frenzy of despair. God forbid that out of this

profession, sworn to sustain and support the organic law, entrusted with the keeping of the sacred rights of the people, should longer be thrown the firebrands of disorder and destruction.

Judges! You high priests of the bench. Out of your ranks comes, too frequently, the encouragement which incites in the discontented a contempt for law and our institutions. Justice is blind, but from the eyes of the ministers of the bench the blind sometimes falls, and across the perspective of ambition float the incentives to unsubstantial distinction and distinguishment which have already merged precedent in a vast mass of inconsistent, incongruous and contradictory judicial decisions, until the great leading principles of the common law have been lost sight of, and the moorings of constitutional law disturbed. The teachings of dishonorable, selfish and unscrupulous men, prompting an honest and patriotic people to the delusive belief that they are the objects of oppression, the slaves of a rapacious aristocracy and the vassals of organized wealth, are the stimulants of discontent and the menace of popular, constitutional government.

Never in the history of mankind has there existed for man such opportunities as the government, so wisely builded by the fathers, now offers. The opportunities exist; they need not be created. The young man of to-day who performs his duty, grasps the opportunities offered, no matter in what walk of life he strives, will reach the level of his capabilities in the early years of manhood, that great goal of individual effort guaranteed by the fundamental law of our land.

The misdirected policy of the discontented is to tear down, not to build up; to pull down to their own listless level the aspiring, ambitious, patriotic energies of the individual, to render the coming of a future Hamilton impossible.

The multitude, stimulated by the insane belief that favoritism is rampant, that government is for the benefit of the few, goaded by the taunts of unscrupulous men to the frenzy of revolution, may overturn the foundations of the only free government in existence, may turn back the tide of civilization and sink the spirit of individual endeavor and patriotic ambition to the level of the

Dead Sea of inertia and communism; but the principles of our Constitution, the teachings of our Hamilton, deep-rooted in the soil of eternal justice, will fruit again, in more congenial ground, nurtured by the affection of a saner people.

Hamilton was a lawyer, but not of these. He builded that liberty might live; that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, might not perish from the earth."

This is my proposition: From the bar sprang this great charter of human liberty. Out of the law came the great principles which nourish and sustain it. To the bar, To the bar, the envoys of justice, is committed its sacred keeping.

Hamilton was not without ambition, but the creation of an indissoluble Union was its goal. Imperious, exacting, conscious of his power, he was a leader of leaders, not of men. He moved in the sphere of refined society, but was always jealous for the liberties of the people. Hamilton was a patriot; his patriotism overshadowed and smothered his personal ambitions and his political hatred. The most intensely loved of men and the most bitterly hated of rivals, his patriotism, his love of the Union, and his intense desire that the Constitution might live, finally compassed his death. When Jefferson, his bitterest enemy, stood face to face with Burr, upon unequal terms in their struggle for the chief executive office of the nation, Hamilton, forsaking the political party which he had created and controlled, burning with the fires of the intensest zeal to maintain the American States in union, incited by the fear that Burr's unscrupulous ambition would subvert the Government, and hopeful that Jefferson's indecision would result in the continuation of the existing theory of government, flung aside ambition, the hope of political preferment and his allegiance to party, and raised to the highest pinnacle of national authority his most bitter opponent and defamer. Search the fields of fiction, scan the annals of history, recall the stories of tradition, and nowhere can you find a parallel of this magnanimous act, prompted only by the forgiving generosity of a great, nation-loving heart.

Ninety-seven years ago to-morrow morning, Hamilton fell a victim to the brutal malice of the disappointed demagogue, Burr.

Patriotism led him as an offering to the spirit of constitutional liberty and constitutional empire.

I fancy that on that July morning, as that great life was ebbing away, as the spirit of his patriotic ambition prompted the spirit of divination, down the vistas of the future he caught the vision of this Republic, an indissoluble union of the States in empire, its full complement of sovereign powers, in equipoise, under the guidance of wise and patriotic men, leader of the nations of the earth, the incense of contentment rising from her altars, moving onward and upward, with the flight of years, in the course of human liberty and beneficent government, working out the deliverance of the enthralled of the earth, carrying the light of civilization into the dark places of the world, until the quarrels of the nations should be stilled, the principles of free popular government enthroned and established in the affections of the peoples of the universe, guided by one hope, one aspiration and one God, all the nations of the earth, listening to the music of American progress and American freedom, should march together into the dawn of universal liberty and universal peace. This was the dream, the hope and the prayer of the foremost of American

statesmen.