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I believe, and those of you who do not agree with me now will, I think, share my faith within a year or two, that our new banking and currency laws give us noble and powerful machinery with which to change dangers to blessings and enabling us to deal with the most rapidly widening demands on our energy and resources.

We have a government founded on broad, farseeing, sagacious thought, on the highest philosophy and noblest purposes. It is established on the love and confidence of a free-born and intelligent people. Fast as we have gained in wealth and strength we have gained more and faster in breadth, in spirit, in the true religion that recognizes human brotherhood and our obligations to each other, in that purest of piety that teaches service as our highest function and magnanimity and justice as the first and best achievements of a great people.

So we stand among the turbid surges of a troubled and stricken world as a mountain of peace and rest and refuge, or, in the words of the Psalmist, "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

We will be the gathering place for the renewal and distribution of hope and purpose, for the restoration and purification of a civilization drowned in blood and wrecked and dismantled by furious and reckless passion.

Tragic and pitiful as it is, we may find gratification and hope in the constant appeal made to us by one strong people or another on the means and methods used by brave men of different tongues and birthplaces in deadly strife with each other. God forbid from us the vanity that would assume for ourselves superiority over any of these, our brethren, at war. May God and our memories protect us against the sin and arrogance of self-complacency or the Pharisee's thanksgiving that we are not as other men. We need not look back far to know of our own sins and weakness and follies, blessed and kept and led as we have been. In profound gratitude to the Power that has delivered us from the consequences of them, and in deep humility, we may find our gratification in the hope that the dove of peace, once sent winging over the deluge, may find a resting place here, and carry from us an acceptable olive branch.

We do not invite such opportunity, but we would welcome it, and all of us—I am speaking only for and to representatives of the conservative and thinking people of our country-would unite in the ambition that we might be the means of helping not only toward permanent peace in the world but toward actual justice and the betterment of mankind. We can afford to speak for peace, because we have proved sternly that we do not fear war when it is necessary and just.

Our voice for peace is not soprano expostulation. It has the deep, harsh, masculine note of big guns, well served at efficient target practice. If the time comes for us to urge or invite or help toward peace, it will be not because our interests require it, or because we are nervous or fearful, but because as a community of free and peaceful people we desire very earnestly the deliverance and advancement of our brother man. We will talk peace as strong and prepared men talking face to face to strong men.

In any case, we will stand a living monument to the truth that the statesmanship of peace and patience is the most successful, that the diplomacy of mercy and exact honor is the wisest because directed by the spirit of eternal wisdom.

Equipped for emergency as we never before had been, we have met this fearful stress undisturbed. We meet opportunity, such as never has come to a people, with purposes higher and wider and purer, we trust, than any people ever have felt; with the power gathered of peace, the resources derived of honest industry, and the will born of our own self-searching, to lead the world; to be its dominating influence; and to use that influence to bless and brighten, lift and comfort all humanity.

O

GOVERNMENT BY JUDGES

ADDRESS

DELIVERED

AT COOPER UNION, IN NEW YORK CITY
ON JANUARY 27, 1914

By

HON. WALTER CLARK

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF NORTH CAROLINA

PRESENTED BY MR. OVERMAN
MARCH 24, 1914.-Referred to the Committee on Printing

WASHINGTON

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

REPORTED BY MR. CHILTON.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES,
October 21, 1914.

Resolved, That the manuscript submitted by Mr. Overman on March 25, 1914, entitled "Government by Judges," an address delivered by Chief Justice Walter Clark, of the North Carolina Supreme Court, at Cooper Union, New York City, January 27, 1914, be printed as a Senate document.

Attest:

JAMES M. BAKER, Secretary.

GOVERNMENT BY JUDGES.

Address by Chief Justice WALTER CLARK, of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, delivered at Cooper Union, New York City, January 27, 1914.

MY FELLOW CITIZENS: It has been said that a contented people have no annals. The present unrest among the people, not only in this country but the world around, strange as it may seem to some, is one of the best signs of the times. When people at large are content, they are either ignorant of better conditions or hopeless of attaining them. A "divine discontent" is the basis of civilization, and of all progress in bettering the condition of humanity.

Some one has said that "civilization is h-ll to the under dog!" Those who create the wealth of the world do not possess it, for they pass through the world with the barest living, and not always that, while those who do not create it have all of it except the mere subsistence of those who create it and of the other workers. We are fond of saying that this country is a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people"; that our Government rests upon the consent of the governed; that all power is derived from the people and is to be exercised for their benefit and in accordance with their will. This is the end toward which the world is moving. We shall some day realize that ideal, but it will be "far on in summers that we shall not see," for as yet we are merely "on our way."

All advance toward better conditions has been through a ceaseless combat between those who exploit and those who are exploited; between those who create the wealth of a country and those who take as large a share of it as they can grasp.

In this country, as in all countries, the control of the Government is in the hands of the few. Our institutions merely give an easier opportunity to the many whenever they have the will and the intelligence to improve their conditions. We have learned that the form of government amounts to very little. The real question is, Where does the control of that government reside?

In the countries of the Old World power was vested in an hereditary sovereign in whose selection the people had no voice and who needed no approval of his conduct, however arbitrary. In the process of time the wealthier classes were able to force recognition, and they became the nobility and hereditary legislators. When, in course of time, after long struggles and many revolutions, the class next below obtained recognition, they elected the lower house, as in England, but upon a suffrage restricted to the well-to-do and by a system which permitted the influence and the money of the government of the king and nobility to dictate the election of a majority of the lower house or their purchase by the bestowal of titles and money.

To this system as buttresses there was an army and navy whose best posts were filled by younger members of the nobility, while the

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