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APPENDIX.

ADDRESS

OF

CORTLANDT PARKER,

PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION.

To help to make the nation one is an evident result to be expected from the complete success of this Association, even if it was not avowed by its original framers. The Bar have, all know, most the to do with suggesting, and ordinarily a very large share, directly or indirectly, in the framing, of statute law. Familiar communion among them tends to harmonize opinions and action, and do away with those variances, if not conflict, in the institutions, legal customs, laws, and polity of the different states, which so powerfully interfere with the oneness of the whole people. And, as I suppose, with direct intent to aid in this most desirable result, more than simply to give information which may profit us as practitioners, was the provision of our Constitution which I am now called upon to obey, that your President, at each yearly meeting, shall communicate "the noteworthy changes in statute law, in the various states and by Congress, which have occurred since the last meeting."

Climate, early settlement, and various other circumstances affecting locality, have grouped the states of this Union in such a way as to create shades of difference, not in the degree, but in the character, of their civilization. The

citizen upon the Pacific Coast cannot help but differ somewhat from his brother in the far East. The sons of New England are not the same in habits of thought, in universally held opinion, and general character, with those who belong to the middle states, and they are even farther removed from the dwellers in the far South. The Southern Atlantic states contain a population in many respects different from that of Texas, Arkansas, and even Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The Western man who was so called when Ohio was still a Western state, is very Idifferent in his individualities from all that I have mentioned; and as you approach the Rocky Mountains nd the Pacific, the character of the general Western max changes, the boundaries of each state seeming to have something to do with creating diversity of thought and of mental and moral being among our citizens. There seems to be something in mere boundary everywhere, which makes men on either side differ from each other. This is especially perceptible in the Old World, and very remarkably in Great Britain. How different the Scotchman, Irishman, Welshman, and Englishman! And yet they live largely under the very same laws, and have but the one Parliament. Much more remarkable is the difference, apparently created merely by shire or county lines, in England itself, so that there are found there over twenty dialects-dialects such that it is difficult for the residents in one county to be understood in another, though all professing to speak the English tongue.

We in America have no differences so strongly marked as those we find still existing in the two small islands forming Great Britain; but there are differences, nevertheless, between the inhabitants of different sections. Hence, in performing the task allotted to me, I shall not mention the states alphabetically, nor according to seniority of settle

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