rather a discredit to the other departments of the University than a credit either to the Law School or to myself personally. Lastly, it is true that my name is generally associated with what is regarded as a new method of teaching; but the only reason for that is that I happened to be the first to use that method, and hence I have furnished the chief target for the shafts of criticism with which it has been assailed. Others who have followed me have used the method with more success than I have. Besides, this method made its way very slowly and doubtfully, and was seldom mentioned except to be criticised, until it was taken up by your Association. Whatever reputation it now enjoys, therefore, is due chiefly to you.

"I insist, therefore, that there is nothing connected with my twenty-fifth anniversary to make it worthy of any public recognition. Until much less than a year ago, the idea had not entered my head that any public notice would be taken of it, and it would never have entered my head had it not been suggested by others. And I will venture the assertion that, but for your Association, not a dozen persons would know at this moment that I have just completed twenty-five years of service. Yet you have seized upon this unimportant event, and made it an occasion for concentrating the attention of the entire legal world upon this School. Strangest of all, you have succeeded (by what specious arguments I cannot imagine) in persuading a gentleman, whose name and title alone would make him famous wherever English law is known and honored, but yet whose fame would not be a whit the less, though he had inherited the most obscure of names you have succeeded in persuading this gentleman to make a voyage of three thousand miles for the sole purpose of participating in this celebration. Can you be surprised, gentlemen, that I am anxious to place the responsibility for all this where it wholly belongs, namely, upon your shoulders?

"I have but one thing more to say. I trust that none of us will ever forget the great debt which the School owes to Mr. Edward Austin for his gift of Austin Hall. But for his munificence, it is by no means clear to my mind that the Harvard Law School Association would ever have been formed, and, without either Austin Hall or the Harvard Law School Association, it is a matter of mere speculation where the Law School would be to-day."

Sir Frederick Pollock, who was next called upon, briefly thanked the Association and the University for the courtesies shown to him.

"You will not expect me," he added, "to give you any general impressions. I have observed that the art of interviewing has been considerably refined. The vulgar notion on our side of the water is still that when an Englishman lands at New York he is immediately beset by several people who ask him, 'Well, sir, and what do you think of our country on the whole ?' That question, I find, is no longer in vogue, if it ever was. But on this occasion I should not have the least difficulty in answering it. I should only have to paraphrase the words that were uttered by Hamlet: whatever may have been the case in Denmark, in New England man delights me, and woman is adorable."

After remarking that the celebration was honored by the presence of

three members of the U. S. Supreme Court, and regretting that Chief Justice Fuller would be unable to speak, President Carter called upon

JUSTICE HORACE GRAY, '45.

"Fellow students, for you see before you to-day in the President of the Association, in the eminent professors of jurisprudence on either side of him, and in all the distinguished magistrates who sit at this board, that we are all but fellow students from the beginning to the end, no brighter example, no more worthy leader could be found than in the Dane Professor, whom we honor and whose services we commemorate here to-day. I think, perhaps, without any danger of going too far in eulogy, I may say that the length, the period of time during which he has been a teacher has been too much abridged. Mr. President, you and I remember, not 25 years ago, but more than 50, when we first made his acquaintance and when from him we began to learn jurisprudence. I may say, also, that he looks at the law of our country, as it must necessarily be looked at, in the double aspect of a science to teach principles and of a practical rule to govern affairs. He has all the learning of a German professor, and all the practical sense and wisdom of an English and American common lawyer. . . .

"I was glad to hear from our distinguished guest to-day his encomium on the common law and his conviction that the rules of the common law were those that must, with proper adaptations and modifications, govern our jurisprudence. You all remember what Edmund Burke said was the glory of the common law, 'it combines the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human affairs.' And I may be permitted to quote what is not so well known, what a great lawyer and statesman and leader of Massachusetts, Gov. John A. Andrew, from whom I received my first judicial commission more than 30 years ago, said to me in talking of the common law. I was speaking with him, in conversation, of its merit of growing, of its progressiveness, its adaptation to new circumstances. 'Yes,' he said, one may say without presumption, that it is not as carnal commandment, but by the power of an endless life.'

"I do not know, though, that I look forward to the time when we may have a system of law governing the whole world one system or at least governing the English-speaking race, which is likely to be very much the same thing. I do not know that I can quite go so fast and so far as our distinguished guest, when it is suggested that the executive government of this country might consult the judges of England, or that the Queen of England might consult the Supreme Court of the United States. I remember that President Washington once asked the first judges on the bench, all of whom were his own appointments, to advise him on a diplomatic question arising with a foreign nation, and they told him they were very sorry, but that was hardly a judicial duty.

“I was struck, also, with an allusion somewhat veiled, in which our learned guest spoke of the two systems of law, the civil and the common law. And if there is any third, I think perhaps it might be in his mind that the Empire of Japan, already distinguished in arts and in arms, might perhaps come forward in some way as yet unknown to make its contributions to the science of universal jurisprudence."

The next to be called on was

JUSTICE HENRY B. BROWN, L. S.,

'59.

"It has always been a source of regret to me that my attendance at the Harvard Law School was of such brief duration that it has always seemed presumptuous in me to claim that I am a Harvard man; but in view of your repeated courtesy which has insisted upon recognizing me as such, I think that if it be a fraud at all on my part, it is one of those tacit frauds, or rather a condoned fraud, of which even a court of equity would not take notice. My study of the law was rather under protest. I had been destined for another profession, and when I finally announced to my father of blessed memory that I had concluded to study law, he said that he was disappointed because he had hoped to see me grow up to be an honest man. If 35 years of regret were sufficient to constitute a man a Harvard man, I think I should be a graduate in good standing. I have always looked upon my brief sojourn here as the pleasantest episode of my student life.

"The Harvard Law School at that day was without a rival. Its corps of instructors, though small, were without a superior in the country. There was Emory Washburn, who had been governor of the Commonwealth, a strikingly handsome man, an intellectual man, whose eloquence made even the law of contingent remainders interesting, and the statute of uses and trusts to read like a novel. There was Theophilus Parsons, genial and enthusiastic, the most prolific legal writer of his generation, whose lectures upon admiralty and commercial law wedded me to that branch of the profession; and, unlike most American weddings, it has never been followed by a divorce. There was, also, Joel Parker, who had been chief justice of New Hampshire, who brought to the platform of the lecturer the sedate yet kindly manner that had characterized him as a judge, and who was in my eyes the very ideal of what a judge ought to be. While boarding at the Brattle House, I enjoyed the companionship of John Langdon Sibley, then librarian of the University, an eccentric old bachelor, who subsequently took unto himself a wife and spent the last years of a very useful life in compiling the genealogies of the older Harvard graduates. My fellow students were of the best blood of the land, sons not of New England only, but of every State north and south, and east of the Mississippi. The raid upon Harper's Ferry by John Brown occurred while I was here, and mutterings of the Civil War had already begun to be heard. Many of the students subsequently left the School to enlist either in one army or the other, and the names of some of my personal friends are now engraved upon the tablets in Memorial Hall.

"If I am asked to answer the question, What has Harvard done for the legal education of the country, I will answer it by a paraphrase upon the motto on the coat of arms of my State, Michigan: “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice." If you want to know what Harvard has done for the profession, look about you. . . . As I listened to the eloquent address of our honored kinsman across the sea, I thought to myself how much we owed our prosperity to our grand inheritance of the common law of England, the law as taken from Kenyon and Coke and Mansfield and a host of others of the present century

...

scarcely less illustrious than these. And it occurred to me that perhaps we had done a little something ourselves in the repayment of that debt by our legislation for the emancipation of married women, for the establishment of new codes of pleading and for the admission of parties and other interested persons to the witness-box. And yet I am free to confess that we have a great deal yet to learn from our English cousins in their admirable methods of dispatching business, in the celerity of their trials by which absolutely more cases are disposed of in an English court in a day than in the average American court in a week. I have sometimes thought that we perhaps had paid a little too dearly for the abolition of the two grades of the profession and the loss of a highly trained body of experts whose sole duty it was to try cases upon briefs furnished by others. And I utterly refuse to believe that there is not something radically wrong in any administration of the law which requires a month to be consumed in the impaneling of a jury. And I wondered to myself whether or not there were any of that type of the English lawyers left of which William Murray was an example, who, before he became Lord Mansfield, on being sent a retainer of a thousand guineas by the Duchess of Marlborough, insisted on returning all but five. The duchess, however, is said to have pestered him so much by her eccentricities that it is probable that he regretted the nine hundred and ninety-five sent back. His clerk one day, giving an account of a call made by her in his absence, says: 'I could not make out, sir, who she was, for she would not give me her name; but she swore so dreadfully I knew it must be a lady of quality.'

"I have been a long time out of practice and cannot speak from personal knowledge, but my observation from the bench would lead me to believe that that type of American lawyer was practically extinct, although there may be a few left in New York. The bar has always been distinguished for the modesty of its charges. But Brother Carter will have a better knowledge upon that than I. While my attendance at the Harvard Law School antedated by a long time the construction of the building in which it is now housed and the accession of Professor Langdell, who has contributed so much to its reputation and its prosperity, I am none the less proud to claim connection with it, and am willing to boast myself a Harvard man every day in the year but one, and that is the day of the regatta in New London, on which I am a Yale man. I rejoice in the splendid career and abundant prosperity of this University. I rejoice in the eminent men it has contributed to the world of statesmanship and letters. I rejoice in its long list of graduates now prominent in public life, and I firmly believe that Harvard and Yale are destined to exert a constantly increasing influence for good in the future of the country."

JUDGE O. W. HOLMES, '61.

"I see that we have a good many who have graduated within the last 25 years, and therefore I know that I am in the presence of very learned men. As for myself, lately my thoughts have been turned to old, far-off, forgotten years and battles of long ago; and when once the ghosts of the dead fifers of thirty years since begin to play in my head, the laws are silent. And yet as I look around me, I think to myself, like Correggio, 'I too am, or at least have been, a pedagogue.' And as such I will venture a reflection.

"Learning, my learned brethren, is a very good thing. I should be the last to undervalue it, having done, I hope, my share of quotation from the year books. But it is liable to lead us astray. The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, a government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination. We cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in showing, in making manifest, the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity. I hope the time is coming when this thought will bear fruit.

"An ideal system of law should draw all of its postulates and its legislative justifications from science. As it is now, we depend upon tradition or vague sentiment, or the fact that we never thought of any other way of doing things, as our only warrant for rules which we enforce with as much confidence as if they embodied a recorded wisdom. What reasons of a different sort can any one here give for believing that half the criminal law does not do more harm than good? Our forms of contract, instead of being made once for all, like a yacht, along lines of least resistance, are accidental rulings of early nations, concerning which the learned dispute. How much has reason had to do in deciding how far, after all, it was expedient for the State to meddle with domestic relations? And so I might go on through the whole law.

"The Italians have gone to work upon the notion that the foundations of the law ought to be scientific. If our civilization is not destined to an eclipse, I believe that the regiment or division that follows us will carry that flag. Our own word seems the last always; and yet the difference between an argument in Proudhon and one in the time of Lord Ellenborough, or even between that and one of our own day is as marked as the difference between Cowley's poetry and Shelley's. Other changes as great will follow. And so the eternal procession moves on, we in the front for the moment, and stretching away against the inaccessible sky, the black spear-heads of the army that has been moving in continuous line already for nearly a thousand years."

President Carter, in introducing Joseph H. Choate, said: "Gentlemen, our friend Mr. Justice Brown has recognized that we had among us to-day one who carries a great name and who has added to its honors. I would have said that myself, if he had not anticipated me. The fame of our Brother Choate and the fame of Harvard are one. I was going to say that if the fame of our Brother Choate and of Harvard were not inseparately bound together, I do not know which would go the farthest. When our distinguished guest landed at the wharf in New York the other day, and I was fortunate enough to get down there in season to meet him, the first observation he made to me I believe he alluded to it in his address to-day-after he got upon the wharf was, 'As soon as I get my baggage stowed here, I want to talk with you