Thursday evening, March 15.

William G. Thompson, Esq. Introduced by HENRY F. HURlburt, Esq. Subject: "Administration of Law in Massachusetts."

Wednesday evening, March 28.

Intro

Hon. Nathan Matthews, LL.D., former Mayor of Boston. duced by B. N. JOHNSON, Esq. Subject: "Public Service Company Valuations and Rates."

REVIEW OF RECENT EVENTS

Harvard Musical Clubs

The Harvard Musical Clubs, Glee, Banjo and Mandolin, appeared before the members on Thursday evening, December 7, and rendered one of the finest concerts it has been the privilege of the members to hear. Expressions of approval were heard on all sides, and the auditorium, packed to the doors, with a hundred men standing, attested to the attraction of this musical organization.

"Mountaineering in North America"

The members of the Club were given a treat on Thursday evening, December 21, when Le Roy Jeffers, F.R.G.S., delivered his address on "Mountaineering in North America." It served a twofold purpose in showing the hazards of mountain climbing and also bringing before the eyes the beauties of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Jeffers has a collection of slides that shows vividly the beauties of this continent, and his interesting descriptions of the scenes stamp him as a keen observer of the beauties of nature.

MOORFIELD STOREY ON "LAWLESSNESS"

December 12

At the dinner preceding the address, Mr. A. B. Beeching presided, and used the opportunity to call attention to the significance of the alliance between the Club and the Boston Bar Association by which such addresses as Mr. Storey's were made possible. Brief but weighty talks on aspects of the law and law enforcement were made by Mr. E. W. Burdett, a former president of the Boston Bar Association, Mr. Reginald H. Smith of the Legal Aid Society, and Justice Wilfred Bolster of the Municipal Court, the latter reporting that investigation showed a marked decline in the present population of the penal institutions of the state, county and city. Mr. Smith described the need of stricter care by society for the rights of persons unable pecuniarily to meet the costs of

litigation, either defensive or assertive of personal claims; and he showed how his society aided the needy poor in their struggle against loan sharks and usurers.

At the meeting in the auditorium, Rev. Dr. Geo. A. Gordon, minister of the Old South Church, presided and introduced the speaker. He said:

"The best thing that a man can do who introduces a great speaker is to do his work very briefly and get out of sight just as soon as possible. And I am not going to entertain you, because this is a serious evening, and the subject is a serious one.

"No one has the slightest insight into the heart of the legal profession until he finds that it is impossible for any man to be a great lawyer unless he has a profound sense of justice. As a layman, in reading history, I find that without the jurists our political institutions could never have been framed - could never have been established; that without the influence of jurists, the meaning of our political institutions never could have been ascertained and never could have been fixed; and without the influence of jurists the political institutions of the country could not be profitably run for one month, nor the business of the country handled. Surely that is a great tribute, and I believe it to be a genuinely valid tribute to the legal profession.

"A great jurist hates lawlessness as a great musician hates discord. A great patriot hates lawlessness as a noble father hates disease when it comes into his household. A great citizen hates lawlessness as a friend shudders to think of the open sources of woe among his friends. And a reformer regards lawlessness as one of the chief interdicts against the coming of the kingdom of manhood in the world.

"It is my privilege this evening to introduce one whom I have known for more than twenty-five years as a great jurist, a great patriot, a great citizen, and a man instinct with the spirit of genuine and undiscourageable reform. I have the honor to introduce to you as the speaker of the evening Hon. Moorfield Storey."

Mr. Storey in reply said: "Gentlemen, The Chairman's introduction I cannot help feeling is so much too flattering that I feel as Judge Fessenden felt last night, as if it might be a case of mistaken identity.

"The subject which I propose to discuss to-night has been announced as 'Lawlessness.' Civilization is the control of the individual will by law: the will, that is to say, of the whole community expressed in statute. And the civilization of any community must be measured by its obedience to and respect for the law. We people of Massachusetts flatter ourselves that we are a law-abiding community, par excellence. We like to repeat the words of John Adams in the constitution of Massachusetts, that this is a government of laws and not of men.' We profess to have the greatest respect for the law. The rule was well laid down by Herbert Spencer, in 1882: Free institutions can be maintained only by citizens, each of whom is instant to oppose every illegitimate act, every official excess of power, however trivial it may seem. . . . All these lapses from higher to lower forms begin in trifling ways, and it is only by incessant watchfulness that they can be prevented.'

That is an ancient authority, to a certain extent. Let us take

one more modern, and not, in the judgment of many, conspicuous for his attachment to law I mean the former President Roosevelt. He says: The very existence of the republic depends on that spirit of orderly liberty under the law which is as incompatible with mob violence as with any form of despotism.' Or, we may go to Chatham, who says: 'Where law ends tyranny begins.' Those are the fundamental propositions.

Too Much Statute Making

"Now, we in the United States, as I say, profess the greatest respect for the law. We are the busiest lawmakers that ever were. Our first concern, if we find anybody of our neighbors doing something that we do not like, is to undertake to have a new statute prohibiting it. There always rises to our lips the phrase, when we do not like something, 'There ought to be a law against it,' and we get a law. And what is the result? As Mr. Root informs us, during the years from 1909 to 1913, inclusive, the state and national legislatures passed 62,014 statutes, and there were 65,309 decisions, of the national and state courts, reported in 630 volumes.

"To illustrate the difference, I have brought these two books. This is the legislation of the Parliament of Great Britain for the third and fourth years of the present king, dealing with 45,000,000 in the British Islands, and dealing with all the enormous empire of Great Britain. This is the legislation of Massachusetts for one year, dealing with about two and one-half millions, or perhaps three millions of people. This does not include the private laws. The private laws are printed in a volume of about the same size. These are the public and general statutes which affect all the citizens. There is the contrast. As Mr. Root says, if anybody who is familiar with the subject undertakes to go before the committee of the legislature that is dealing with a subject before the legislature, he is regarded as a lobbyist looking after his own interest; and the people who do not know anything about the subject are the people who pass the laws.

The old spirit in Massachusetts in regard to the law may be, perhaps, exemplified by a story of my own experience on Cape Cod. Many years ago I was riding from Marston's Mills to Cotuit, and my driver was an old Cape Cod dealer; and when we were driving through Mashapee we passed through a long stretch of woods, in the middle of which was a very tempting trout stream; and I said to the driver, 'Are there any fish in that brook?' and he said, 'Oh, yes, many of them.' I said, 'Do many people come here to fish?' and he said, 'Oh, no. It is against the law.' I said, 'Do you mean to tell me that, notwithstanding that, there are not men come down here to fish?'; and he said, 'Why, no, sir. It is against the law.' I said, ' Suppose it is against the law. Don't people come here and catch a few trout? 'Why, no, sir. It is against the law.' That was as far as his conception would go. It was impossible that anybody, even in that lonely wood on Cape Cod, should dream of breaking the law. That is the olden time. Unhappily, that time has very thoroughly gone by.

How Laws are Broken

"I want to call your attention, briefly, to what is going on in this country, and has been for a great many years to the fact that the laws and the Constitution are broken and evaded, not only by the people but by the officers of state, nation, and city, who are appointed to enforce them. It is not a great many years ago since the inquiry was made by Mr. Roosevelt, 'What is the Constitution among friends?' and that is the doctrine of a good many practical business legislators and lawyers. We fought, between the years 1861 and 1865, a long and bloody war, and the result was the adoption of three amendments the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments that we placed in the Constitution of the United States; and the last of those amendments undertook to secure to every citizen of the United States the right to vote, no matter what his color, his race, or his previous condition of servitude. And you know, and I know, that that provision of the Constitution is, in the southern states, a dead letter. We know that, at first by force and by the Ku Klux Klans, and then by stuffing ballot boxes and the use of tissue-paper ballots, and then by grandfathers' clause legislation,- which the Supreme Court of the United States held to be unconstitutional, — and then by the action of election officers who, when they came to a colored man, would ask him to read some provision of the Constitution and ask him to interpret it, and then say that his interpretation was not sound, and cast him out; and by all forms of fraud, the vote in those states is suppressed. We all know it. We know that that gives to the southern states more electors and more representatives than they are entitled to that they count these colored men when the question is how many representatives they are entitled to, and they do not count them when it comes to determining who those representatives shall be. Do we say anything about it? Do we exer

cise any public opinion against the fact that 10,000,000 of our fellowcitizens, more or less, are deprived of those fundamental rights? And do we suppose that we can go on trampling on those people year after year without paying for it? Our experience with the Civil War ought to have taught us better, but it has not.

"Take another matter. One of the fundamental rights of an American is that if he is charged with crime he shall be tried by a court

he shall have a chance to go before a jury. You and I know that all through the South they are deprived of that right. We know that they are lynched not for what people are in the habit of calling a crimebut for anything. The other day, in South Carolina, because a colored man swore at a white man who would not pay him what he thought he was entitled to, he was given a bloody and brutal lynching. Now, that has been going on for a great many years. And, so far as I know, it is not confined to the South, because we had a case of a man who was burned at the stake in Coatesville, Pa., in broad daylight, merely because he and a white man had had a fight and a white man had been shot and he had not been. We know that at Springfield, Ill., the home of President Lincoln, there was a regular onslaught upon the colored population

that their houses were destroyed, their property burned, and they themselves abused in every possible way. One hundred and eighty

seven indictments were returned, and not one human being was convicted. We know that in Coatesville they did not get so far, even, as to return an indictment. And that is close to Philadelphia. That is in the North.

"We know that some thirty or forty colored men failed in an attack on the Mexicans last spring and were imprisoned in the Mexican country; and we almost went to war with Mexico in order to have those forty men delivered up. We were not responsible, primarily, for what was done in Mexico. But we are responsible for what is done in the United States. And, instead of these forty men, who came back safe and sound and whole, we have hundreds of men, all through various parts of the country, who are killed in cold blood, and tortured in the most brutal manner, and we say nothing.

"I have tried within this last year to start an agitation against that lynching. I have tried to raise $10,000 as a fund. Two people subscribed a fifth of it, and it took us six months to raise the rest. The people of this region do not care. We read in history what the Indians used to do to the white men, and we hold up our hands in horror. We read what the Germans do to the Belgians, and our blood boils. Here in our own country, in our own state, almost close on the other side

these things are done, and our blood is perfectly cold.

"Now, I have always said that these things do not hurt the men who directly suffer for them half as much as they hurt the men who do the mischief. In Waco, Tex., the other day, which is a city of half a dozen colleges, the population gathered around and a great portion of the people being a crowd of respectable people, and I have a photograph of them, with their last summer's straw hats, women, children, and men to see a negro burned at the stake. He was smeared with kerosene and burned. Now, all of those people went away from there brutalized. They suffered more from it than the negro did. Their impressions as to what was right and wrong were dulled. They said, 'Oh, this is common this is going to be done everybody does this, and nobody objects' and the result is that steadily down, down, down, the moral sense of that community goes.

"Only the other day Leo Frank, a white man, whom a good many people in this country thought was unjustly convicted of murder, had his sentence commuted, and was sent to the state's prison for life, at the request and on the petition of a good many people. And the law-abiding citizens of Georgia went to that prison and took him out and hanged him. And, not only that, they notified the governor of Georgia, who had commuted his sentence, that if he came back to Georgia he was in danger of his life. In other words, the governor of Georgia, having done what he thought was his duty and what a very large number of the people in the country thought was his duty, was told by his fellowcitizens that he was in danger of lynching if he came back to that state.

"Now, the public opinion in the United States ought to express itself against things of that sort. They ought not to be content to let one great section of this country be disgraced by things of that sort. You cannot have civilization decayed in one part of this country without its decaying all over the country. You cannot have a boil on your heel without its affecting your head. Your whole system is affected

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