ITEMS OF INTEREST April 23, 1910 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Moorfield Storey, president of the Boston Bar Association, sounded a note of warning at the recent annual banquet of that organization. He expressed the belief, with President Taft, that the administration of criminal law is a disgrace to civilization, and that on the civil side the law always works benefit to the man with the longest purse. "Men are blind," he said, "who cannot see that we will soon be entered on the greatest contest in history. A struggle is coming against executives, against judges, and against everybody who wishes to deny his fellow-citizens equal rights and equal opportunities.

"The expenses and delays of litigation, even in the best conducted lawsuits, are enormous, and in the hands of unscrupulous practitioner have become a means of oppression hardly distinguishable from blackmail. We must set ourselves to the work of reducing the expenses and delays of litigation. In the present crisis it is our duty to uphold the courts and the law, but our first duty is to make the law an instrument of justice."

Governor Hughes of New York, in a recent speech says: "Political corruption is not partisan. It is the common enemy. The essential operations of government inevitably furnish opportunities for scoundrelism, and against this curse all parties and the people as a whole must continually wage an unrelenting war. These are wholesome days for the people of this state, full of opportunity and promise. We may be humiliated by disclosures, but these mark our safety as well as our danger, our progress and not our decline. I want to see the springs of government pure and its waters sweet to the taste. I want to see the illict efforts of privilege frustrated, bribery and corrupt arrangements destroyed, and the market-places, where governmental favor has been bought and sold, converted into true assemblies of honest representatives of the people."

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