necessity which justifies the existence of a Court of Appeals superior to the appellate tribunals which first. review the decision of the Trial Courts. But for this the whole difficulty could be readily solved by abolishing the Court of Appeals, allowing only one appeal and constituting four strong appellate Courts whose judgments should be final." What was "this difficulty," like unto the proviso which the French Ambassador has criticised as existing in many of our public documents? The volume of business was so great that the Appellate Division could not do it. as one Court, the Appellate Division must itself be divided into four parts, going omnia Gallia one better, so to speak. (Laughter.) So on account of this necessity of business which required this division, which involved the idea that as we did not sit together we would disagree, in the words of the poet," fighting like devils for conciliation and hating each other for the love of God," the Constitution had to provide a Court of Appeals. Here we stand, four Appellate Divisions of the State," remote, unfriended, melancholy," slow; remote in Buffalo, unfriended in Albany, melancholy in New York and slow in my own department. (Laughter.) Do we ever differ? Never on the fundamental law. On points of practice, yes. When we fear that the Court of Appeals must explain its existence, Ingraham, P. J., calls on telephone, "Jenks, we must differ on some point of practice preserve the Court of Appeals." (Laughter.)

The wonder is, having so much to do, that we do so well. The reason why we do no better is that we have to find the law so rapidly that we cannot think at all, or stop to state reason of our law. Like the man in the country village who said to his old friend, explaining the daily life of the rural burgh, "Sometimes we set and think and

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THE APPELLATE DIVISION

sometimes only set." (Laughter.)

(Laughter.) But, oh, how proud, how happy we are if we mice can help the lions of the Court of Appeals! But struggle as we may with our sentences of purity, precision and propriety, carefully plagiarized from Lord Mansfield, John Marshall or William H. Taft, if we are affirmed without opinion we are mindful as the Conqueror was mindful of the whisper of the slave in the Roman Triumph, of the words in Rogers v. Decker (131 N. Y.). (Laughter.) "Our affirmance of Hill against Bigelow, supra, without an opinion made us responsible only for the point decided, but did not make us guarantors of all the reasons given, or of the opinion expressed." (Laughter.) If we are affirmed with opinion, then we are conscious that our own opinion, as Grover Cleveland once said to the Board of Aldermen in Buffalo, "would never do," and when we are affirmed on opinion the exuberance of our tumult is offensive to our associates. (Laughter.) When we are reversed, and Sir Arthur Helps says many a crime in this world comes from weariness, we quote the closing lines of the Dunciad, "Thy hand, great Anarch, let the curtain fall and melancholy darkness covers all."

Recognizing that our function is to settle litigation and that of the Court of Appeals is to settle law, and that they cannot settle it by maxims as if they were Jurists, the first principle to which we should address ourselves is how to save, to preserve and to perpetuate the Court of Appeals. The facts, like the past, are secure. We can keep them from the facts. (Laughter.) (Laughter.) But how about the law? They tell us that they do not look at the opinions of the Appellate Division. My idea is that they would be saved very much trouble and be cajoled into many affirmances if we would adopt a rule to insert our opinions as part of the record. Indeed, we would never be reversed. (Laughter.)

All this is a parlous shot from an elder gun. And now a serious word. The only man who was the peer in the Constitutional Convention of my friend the Senator from New York, said these words of our Court of Appeals to that body: "I think it will be difficult to find in any jurisdiction any Court that has better maintained the uniformity of the law than this Court has done or better given law to the community over which it has presided. No matter where you search, among what States, in what Federal tribunal or in any of the Courts abroad." (Applause.) I believe they are absolutely just. It is a great Court that knows no waning.

Now, gentlemen, one word to the Bar. I can bear tribute to their kindness and their courtesy.

We are members of a common profession, not co-workers in a business pursuit. I would not, if I could, differentiate myself from my brethren at the Bar. I am too proud to be numbered with them. Placed in power often by their action and by their forbearance, we Judges should not forget that we have a common cause. If, as the distinguished King's counsel has said, the Bar look up to us, we should not look over them, and as we lean upon them we must not lessen them. We must not think that arrogance is austerity or that a Jurist should not be a gentle

man.

There are about 17,000 members of our profession in this great municipal district. The very greatness of the numbers prevents the familiarity or the friendship which obtains in other jurisdictions, but at least we can have for them and they for us a feeling of affection in that we are united by a common tie.

Let us remember that the cause of justice, and so the future of our country, rests with us, "For the command

ment is a lamp, and the law is light, and the reproofs of instruction are the way of life." (Applause.)

President Root:

The President of the United States. were given for the President.)

PRESIDENT TAFT:

(Three cheers

Mr. Chairman, members of the New York State Bar Association, ladies and gentlemen, your Chairman has many qualities that make him pre-eminent, but like the great he has his defects. He has been in the habit of coming into the Executive Office and telling me that I was wasting my strength and the time that belonged to the public, by attending banquets in New York and other parts of the country, and that I ought to cease. He did that until he acquired a little responsibility as the head of the Bar of New York, and then he appeared and demanded my presence here. (Laughter.) Association with him for years, knowledge of him as a man and a great lawyer, a great statesman, and a familiarity with the high standard of the New York Bar, made the invitation which he brought me a real command. (Applause.)

I have had for years a feeling that the Bar and the Bench of this country owed to the people of the country greater effort than has been manifested in the past toward making the administration of the law effective and really just by expediting judgments; and I am glad to note that during the present decade there has been in almost every Bar Association and notably in this — a profound effort to study where it is that we can shorten litigation in order that delay may not make a just judgment unjust. (Applause.)

I believe in codification. There are a good many things that one believes in after he has had an opportunity to

widen his horizon. If I were to describe the English Bar and the American Bar, I should think they have suffered somewhat from insularity; that they thought the way of hammering out justice with rude instruments and with precedents constituting a wilderness was the only real way of making law fit for free people. But it fell to my lot to go to a community where the law was founded on the code to which the French Ambassador has referred, and when I examined that code and found the beautifully simple, comprehensive and clear language in which the principles of the law were stated, I began to think that we did not know anything about the law in the administration of AngloSaxon jurisprudence. (Applause.) But I found that there, as well as with us, there had been a tendency toward the view that litigants were made for courts, and the exercise of the refinements of reason, rather than that courts and codes were made for litigants, and that in the procedure there were quite as many opportunities for keeping that is for a deft counsellor to keep his antagonist pawing in the vestibule of justice as with us, and I do not think that it can be said that they have reached the secret of expedition that is necessary to promote real justice more than we have. But I believe there is a movement the world around to which His Excellency has referred, and which is evident by meetings like this and the proceedings of meetings like this, that will certainly solve the problem. The Supreme Court of the United States itself slumbered one hundred years with equity rules that were full of delay, and now they are struggling to make those rules simple and effective so as not to involve the disgraceful expense that has attended equity litigation in the Federal Courts.

But I did not come here, my friends, to discuss that part of our practice. I think it is perhaps in one sense the most important reform for us, and I sincerely hope