_Mr. Toastmaster; Judge Rose; My Hosts_:
Let me at the outset say a word of thanks to the Arkansas Consistory
for its generous hospitality, and say how much I appreciate it.
I want to say just one word suggested by the fact that Judge Rose was
President of the American Bar Association and stands to-day as one of
that group of eminent American citizens, eminent for their services to
the whole country, whom we know as the leaders of the American bar.
I want to speak as a layman about certain services that the learned
profession, of which Judge Rose is so eminent a member, can render to
an even greater degree than they now render to the American people. I
know that there is a good deal of distrust, rightly, for the layman
who speaks of law or of theology. But I am going to say just a few
words on a matter that concerns good citizenship, in which the layman
has a right to expect leadership both from lawyer and from theologian.
Very naturally in any profession there come to be men who treat the
profession as an end instead of as a means (I am not now speaking
from the standpoint of the individual, but from the standpoint of
the Nation, of the State). Just as we have a right to judge the man
of religious profession by the output that comes as a result of that
profession, so we have a right to expect from the great profession of
the law, from that which is perhaps the leading among the liberal lay
professions, a peculiar quantity and quality of service to the public.
There are certain abuses in connection with our whole system of law
to-day which the laymen can not remedy, but which I earnestly hope that
the men of the law will themselves remedy. I speak merely to my fellow
laymen and invite correction. I am speaking before Gamaliel, and
shall expect correction from Gamaliel if I go wrong. But our law comes
down from the time when the state, the government, was all-powerful as
compared to the individual; when the government acted as a plaintiff
and it was necessary that every possible safeguard should be thrown
around the defendant, that he should be given every chance, and the
fear of injustice was a synonym for fear of injustice to the private
citizen against whom the state proceeded. It comes from a time, if
my memory of history is right, when about five per cent of any given
number of children born in England were punished by hanging, when
people were hanged for the most trivial offences, and when all the
machinery of the law was in the hands of the government and directed
against the individual; so that the one thing that had to be done was
to protect the individual. Circumstances in the past three or four
centuries have wholly changed; but the law has not changed nearly as
rapidly or completely. At present there is not the slightest question
as to the individual’s rights being preserved. They are amply guarded.
Of course there is the possibility of error in every human affair; but
speaking generally, the man accused of criminal wrong, especially the
man accused of criminal wrong against the public, has every possible
chance secured him; but the public has by no means the chance it ought
to have. No greater service is being rendered the American public
to-day than by those members of the legal profession whose great
good fortune it has been to stand forth as prominently identified
with the prosecution of crimes against the state. When I say crimes
against the state I not only refer to crimes like those of bribery
and corruption committed by any public official, but I mean such a
crime as murder, as any similar hideous misdeed, where the offence is
not merely against the individual, but against the entire community.
It is right to remember the interests of the individual, but it is
right also to remember the interests of that great mass of individuals
embodied in the public, in the government. It is unfortunate that
we have permitted practices that were necessary three hundred years
ago for the protection of innocent people to be elaborated, to be
perverted, so that they become a means for allowing criminals to
escape the punishment of their criminality. We urgently need in this
country methods for expediting punishment, methods for doing away with
delay, methods which will secure to the public an even chance with the
criminal. I do not ask any more; if we can get an average of just fifty
per cent of the criminals we will be pretty nearly all right; for that
will give the public an even chance with the criminal whose offence
is against the public. At present the right of appeal is in certain
cases so abused as to make it a matter of the utmost difficulty to
ultimately punish a man sufficiently rich or sufficiently influential
to command really good legal talent. I am speaking of what I know,
for I am speaking with very keenly in my mind experiences during the
past three years in trying to get at certain public offenders who
have been indicted, and some of whom it has been almost impossible to
get into the jurisdiction of the courts in Washington in order to try
them. There are others whose cases are still on appeal who profit by
interminable delays. I feel that the man who offends against the state
occupies a position rather worse than that of any other criminal, from
the very fact that he is a man who attacks everybody instead of just
one person, so that it is not the special business of any one to get
at him. In consequence, if he can keep the forces of justice at bay
long enough—if he can secure one or two mistrials—gradually the popular
interest evaporates and the criminal gets off.
As the Judge has so well said, the minute a man becomes President
he ceases being the President of a party and is the President of
every man, woman, and child within the confines of the Nation. But I
permit myself one particular bit of party discrimination. I am just
a trifle more intent on punishing the Republican offender than the
Democrat; because he is my own scoundrel, and I feel a certain sense of
responsibility for him, and I intend to discharge that responsibility
if I can. Of course, as we all know, offences must come; but I have
endeavored to carry out the Scriptural injunction and to make it a
matter of woe unto him by whom they come. I am happy to say that we
have a reasonable proportion of the offenders in question with stripes
on; but not up to the fifty per cent average that I would like; and I
want to go a little further than we have yet gone.
If the law is reasonably speedy and reasonably sure it takes away one
great excuse for lawlessness. If some horrible crime is committed
and the people feel that under the best circumstances there will be
an indefinite delay in the punishment of the criminal, and that the
punishment will be uncertain even when the time for administering it
comes, then a premium is put upon that kind of law-breaking which
more than any other is a menace to the law. Long delays of justice,
abuses of the pardoning power, the sluggishness with which either court
or attorney moves; all of those things count in bringing about the
condition of affairs which produces lynch law.
Now, a layman can do but little more than to give utterance to the
feeling that so many laymen have. I earnestly hope that the bench and
the bar of the United States will in all proper ways see to it that the
customs—for some of these things of which I complain are merely customs
and not laws—inherited from the past when conditions were totally
different, shall not be perverted so as to wrong the whole public by
giving the criminal an advantage to which he is not entitled, and that
some substantial improvement shall be made in the direction of securing
greater expedition and greater certainty in the administration of
justice, and especially in the administration of criminal justice.
TO A DELEGATION OF THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC, AT NEW ORLEANS, LA.,
OCTOBER 26, 1905
_Comrades_:
I want to thank you for coming here to greet me. I can not say how
much it means to me to be greeted as I have been greeted by the men
who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray in this trip through
the Southland. At Little Rock my escort was composed of Union and
Confederate soldiers, riding side by side, in pairs.
As I said at Richmond, second only to the man who wore the blue, I hold
the man who wore the gray, and we should indeed consider ourselves
fortunate as a Nation that, forty years after the Civil War, we find
all of our people can challenge as the possession of all every memory
of valor left by both sides in the great contest. Now we know but one
rivalry—the rivalry to see which of us can do most for the flag of a
united country.
TO A DELEGATION OF CONFEDERATE VETERANS, AT NEW ORLEANS, LA.,
OCTOBER 26, 1905
_Gentlemen: Rather, if you will allow one who took part in a very small
war to call you so, Comrades_:
I accept your gift with pleasure. Although sometimes we have
difficulties in this country that we have to battle against, and
sometimes things that we are not quite satisfied with, yet we are
pretty good people. I have felt this almost as never before during the
past weeks. Now think what it means in a Nation for the President of
that Nation, forty years after one of the greatest wars of all time,
to be able to come and speak as I spoke in the capital of the Southern
Confederacy, and to feel that I was addressing a people as loyal to the
flag of our reunited country as can be found in this broad land of ours.
I passed in the shadow of the monument of Admiral Semmes in
Mobile—under whom one of my uncles fired the last gun that was
discharged from the “Alabama,” which another uncle built. The daughter
of that admiral is now the wife of our Governor in the Philippines.
Gentlemen, this is an honor I appreciate. I thank you not only for the
gift and the words which accompany it, but for the spirit which lies
behind the words.