ACCORDING TO LAW.

Address by JUDGE TIMOTHY E. HOWARD.

The legend on the seal of the Supreme Court of Indiana reads: Supremum jus, lege suprema (Supreme right, by supreme law).

It is the law that lays down the only certain rule and points out the only safe way by which right may be vindicated and wrong redressed.

While, in all controversies, justice is the sole end to be sought, yet that end, however desirable, can safely be reached only through due process of law.

A multitude of maxims, the concentrated wisdom of the ages, enforces this conclusion:

"Law is a rule of right, and whatever is contrary to the rule of right is an injury."

"Law is the highest reason, and commands what is useful and necessary, and forbids the contrary."

"Law is a sacred sanction, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong."

"The law is the safest helmet; under its shield no one is deceived."

"The law cannot fail in dispensing justice."

"The law works harm to no one, does injury to no one."

"The law regards equity."

"The law regards the order of nature."

"The law speaks to all with the same mouth."

"The law is not to be violated, even by the king."

"The known certainty of the law is the safety of all."

If, therefore, there is a failure of justice, it is not that there is a lack of law. There is, in this vast mass of wisdom accumulated by mankind, a remedy for every wrong, a guard for every right, and if any right goes unvindicated, or any wrong remains unredressed, it can be the fault only of the persons that apply or administer the law. How great, then, is the responsibility of those through whose ignorance, viciousness or cowardice the laws are not administered according to their true intent and purpose, and with all the vigor necessary for the accomplishment of their wholesome sway over the conduct of men.

Notwithstanding these maxims and statements, which, in a wellordered community, are to be regarded as mere truisms, it must, nevertheless, be confessed that there has ever lurked deep in the hearts of all men an unconfessed antagonism to the rule of law.

This secret disaffection is sometimes dignified with the highsounding title of "a sense of natural justice." In the deadly struggle which the French people waged with despotism they sought to ennoble this natural impulse by emblazoning upon their banners such phrases as "the rights of man." And when we were about to

enter upon a mortal struggle with a hoary-headed wrong, one of our own great men appealed, in like spirit, to what he called "the higher law."

It may, indeed, be admitted that, in an unorganized or disorganized condition of society, there must, at times, be a temporary appeal to mere force. The law itself provides for this by permitting, in proper cases, the substitution of the military for the civil rule. That is, the use of physical force in the place of legal action is, on occasion, sanctioned by the very system which reason and morals have slowly and tirelessly built up to secure a government of peace and good will among men.

This appeal to force is oftenest made in new or changing communities, where human passions are strong and the struggle of men for advantage over their fellows is most selfish and unrelenting. So, in the far West, when men sought only for gold, and when, for this, they battled with one another without mercy, and crime defied all restraint, it was the outlawed Vigilance Committee, working wholly through its secret councils, and administering justice by irresponsible violence, that laid the foundations of organized society. And, indeed, history will tell us that almost every civilized people have, at one time or another, gone through such a season of anarchy, thus, as it were, laying upon the bed-rock of rude force. the fair foundations of order and peace and law.

Shall we confess that the appeal to force, as distinguished from the rule of law and morals, goes farther than this seemingly beneficent, or, at least, necessary, assumption of authority on the part of the Vigilance Committee? Is there something in human nature, cr at least in our civilization, that gives further sanction to such government by force? Are men, simply because of their own strength, their own physical prowess or their own superior intellect, unconsciously inclined to the doctrine that might makes right? There are some things in modern, even in recent, history that are calculated to make us think so.

The civilization of our fathers was scandalized at the partition of Poland; but we look with equanimity upon the partition of Africa. The English, French and Germans have nearly completed the conquest and appropriation of that great continent; and it is hard for an impartial observer to see anything in this but the result of brute force.

Those accomplished nations, with the arms, military skill and discipline of a keen and highly intellectual civilization, had the power to overcome the naked barbarians, and this power they have exercised without scruple.

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Cecil Rhodes was called to account for interfering with the Dutch Boers, but only after those sturdy republicans had proved too strong for him. Whether he would have been lionized had he devastated the republic is matter for conjecture. Certain it is that he has won the admiration of England for extending her sway over the native races and establishing in the heart of Southern Africa the great empire of Rhodesia.

The story of the Dutch themselves, in Java and elsewhere, and of the English, French and Russians in Asia, reads but little different.

As for ourselves, we found the red men in possession of the soil; but we have driven them off the ground and taken their lands for our own. This, no doubt, may all be explained by treaties duly made and by territory ceded by the barbarous and the weak to the civilized and the strong. But the truth remains, and it might as well be admitted, that the powerful and the intelligent have, by main force and superior skill, prevailed over the helpless and the ignorant. Physical force, directed by superior intellect, has gained: the mastery.

Our black men were bought, originally, from the slave ships; and, having been purchased as property, were treated as property, even to the extent that when some good souls interposed, claiming for them certain rights under the doctrines put forth in the Declaration of Independence, the courts answered that the black man had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

And, in truth, such was the absolute law, as the law was then written. But civilization was shocked, and made loud protest throughout the Nation. After that came war and blood, and ultimately the black man was given a paper citizenship. Yet, almost at once, slowly at first, and silently, but steadily and persistently, the white man still stood out for his own right to rule. Already the dark race has receded from the position assumed at the close

of the war, and is being pushed back, not, indeed, into slavery, but to its old place in the social and political scale. It is not as yet so written in the law, and perhaps never will be; but the conquering race is again so bringing it to pass that the black man shall have no rights which the white man shall be bound to respect.

The strong, the intellectual, the wealthy, the favored race, will rule. Even now we begin to hear that the only safety of the black man is in harmonizing and subordinating his life to the life of the white man. It is even intimated that amalgamation must be the final refuge from extinction; that only the white blood coursing in the black man's veins can save him from extinction.

Men of European blood-Celts, Teutons, Latins and Slavshaving thus mastered or extinguished the red and the black races, can have little difficulty in overcoming the gentler yellow and brown races. Indeed, the work is already well under way. If those brown and yellow people will but stand still long enough we shall soon be rid of them. And then the dictum that "the only good Indians are the dead ones" will have its application to all the dark races. The white man, having thus relentlessly applied the rule of physical force and intellectual superiority to this troublesome race question, will look out upon the whole earth as his heritage.

This, in the end, will perhaps prove an easier task than further continuing the slow process of converting and civilizing the barbarians. Indeed, some respectable teachers are quoted as intimating that the true mode of conversion is that practiced by the Mahometans, and that we, too, should take up the task of Christianizing and civilizing with the Bible in the one hand and the sword in the other.

It is true that such was not the way taken by our late friends, the enemy, in their treatment of the native races of Mexico, South America and the islands of the South Seas. But our ideas of civ

ilization are different.