vile like you; you may be isolated for life and compelled to forsake home and family and to die among those who are suffering as you from incurable physical or mental disease. Society may shudder at this drastic means employed to protect its physical well being, but society upholds it and has through all the history of man. "Unclean, unclean," has been heard since the days of Moses. In these days serious consideration is being given by medical men and legislative bodies to the proposition to increase the number of diseases whose victims should be isolated from their fellows. Is there reason in the use of these means to protect the physical well being and then allowing the moral leper to roam at large contaminating the youth of the state and weakening its moral fiber? Are we justified in the use of such drastic measures to protect our people against physical and mental delinquents which can only destroy the body, yet turn loose among them those who are so vile and filthy morally as that they will spread disease which will destroy both soul and body? I believe in the absolutely indeterminate sentence, and the parole system cannot be administered for the highest good until it shall be the law. There are men in the prisons of this State who have only moral whooping cough, others the measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, leprosy, and neither patient nor society will be benefited by paroling out the moral leper. Those suffering from the minor troubles should as soon as they have given evidence of recovery and suffered sufficient punishment to impress them with the seriousness of their offense and such as would tend to deter others from like offenses, be allowed their liberty under safeguards which will as best we can guard against relapses. While such as do not should, as in the case of physical and mental derangement, be kept in charge of the State and isolated from their fellows.

Crime if not on the increase, is certainly not on the decrease. It is not my purpose to discuss the cause of it, but I conceive it the duty of a board or other tribunal charged with the responsibility of determining when the man convicted of crime should be turned loose on society to as nearly as it is possible for man to do it, select the men who can be saved to good lives and do all in the power of the State to save them, giving in many cases

the benefit of the doubt to the youth and first offender and to give the old offender and the premeditated criminal and the man who has committed such an offense as that he has forfeited his right to mingle with his kind to understand that the State proposes to try to protect itself against them and their kind. Kindly, humanely, with always a desire to find some reason for clemency, let the law be certainly and speedily enforced and crime will diminish.

THE PRESIDENT: I am sure that Senator Berry has the thanks of every member of this Association for the very able paper he has read in your presence. In these latter days, we are coming to understand that there is much we have not known, and that there is much yet for us to learn, in the study of the criminal class. As prosecutor, and later when engaged in making legislation, I began to be thoroughly convinced that the average criminal is such because of environment and education, and not because of birth or an innate tendency, and we can yet do much in this State and have much yet to do. I confess, I was astounded when I first came into the State Senate, to find no manual training had been provided for the boys at what is commonly known as the "Reform School". There were there between four and five hundred boys, with a superabundance of animal spirit, with no manual training of any character save and except that which came from plowing the corn and chopping wood, and a few other lines of work. It has been ten years since we made the first appropriation for manual training in the Industrial School. In the State of New York they have a reformatory system at Elmira where there are about fifteen hundred incarcerated. Their statistics show that between seventy-five and eighty-five per cent of the inmates are discharged to be heard of no more. If we can place our reformatory on that basis, we can make as good or a better showing, because we do not have New York City or Brooklyn to deal with.

A few years ago I visited Mt. Vernon, and saw the old tomb where George Washington was interred until his remains were removed to the place where they now rest. At the corners of the old farm there stood four cherry trees, which I was advised

had been there from the time the vault was first built by Washington. At that time they were in a bad state of decay. The next day I was in the city of Washington and met a friend of mine employed in the House of Representatives, and he told me that there had been a storm out at Mt. Vernon, and a policeman presented him with a little gavel made from that cherry wood, and I have brought it here to-day and am using it. This is not from the cherry tree George cut down, but rather from the ones that he grew.

I believe this completes the program for the forenoon, and we will take an adjournment until 1:30 P. M.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON SESSION

1:30 O'CLOCK P. M.

THE PRESIDENT: The convention will please come to order. In the absence of the Vice-President, I will call Mr. James O. Crosby of Garnavillo to the chair, who I think is the present Dean of the bar.

MR. CROSBY: Gentlemen, the next order of business is the President's address, "The Judicial Recall", by Senator C. G. Saunders of Council Bluffs.

THE JUDICIAL RECALL

One hundred and thirty-six years have passed since the Liberty Bell, in brazen tones, proclaimed the birth of a new Nation and announced that, under God, there should exist in the new world government wherein all men should be free-a government that was being created for the purpose of vouchsafing to all men, without regard to creed, faith, or station the blessings of liberty and freedom from oppression. At that time, North America was a wilderness, except that along the Atlantic coast and by a few great inland waters there was a narrow fringe of settlers who alternated between fear of the savage and dread of

the royal mandate, usually executed by a haughty governor reenforced by the bayonets of a rude and cruel soldiery.

For many years, the work of building a new Nation was heavy and society was engrossed in the hard struggle for existence. The supreme, yea, the only issue was the construction of a government and to that end the best thought of the day was given. Every patriot contributed of his time and toil, and counted no day lost that had been spent in earnest, often heated, discussion of the fundamentals of free government. Crowding upon the heels of the early struggles, came the contentions over the existence of human slavery which culminated in four years of battle and civil commotion-years in which the very flower of the Nation's manhood went down in fratricidal strife over the so-called right of a human being to own a human chattel. Slavery perished amid the smoke of battle, but many years were required to work out the almost vital problems that came as a legacy of the Civil War. Just as the fires of passion were burning low, there came the brief but glorious struggle with Spain, in which the thought of the Nation was absorbed. Two or three years sufficed, however, practically to dispose of the problems growing out of our last war, and, with the questions involving the very being of the Nation settled, or worse-forgotten, men have addressed themselves to the task of reforming almost every institution known to the Anglo Saxon race, whether the same be good or evil; and change, in too many cases, has been by a misnomer styled "reform" when in fact it has been retrogression.

In the last fifty years, modern invention has subjugated the invisible forces of nature and created new and mighty means for the movement of commerce and the transmission of thought; strange and wonderful creations for the comfort of man have come into being, and the alchemy of the nineteenth century has brought into existence unbounded opportunities for the gaining of wealth. The increase of opportunity has brought to the masses the comforts of a higher civilization, until the luxuries of yesterday have become the necessities of to-day. The dirt floor of the pioneer has given way to the velvet carpet, and the daughters of the laborer now tread the waltz to the notes of a high class orchestra. Prosperity, however, has not brought con

tentment and the masses of the people are convinced that they are not receiving their proper share of the twentieth century progress. Strange as it may seem, this discontent is as prevalent among the rich as the poor. The mad desire for wealth pervades all classes, and, as our Government is now relatively stable, the people are casting about for new means of securing enlarged or additional profits and earnings without added effort. The laborer is convinced that the merchant and the farmer are exacting too great a price for their commodities, the farmer is certain that both the laborer and the merchant are guilty of extortion, the merchant is satisfied that his margin of profit is small, and all are agreed that the great corporations are the cormorants of organized society. The absence of great overshadowing issues and immediate danger to the national life, under these circumstances, has caused all men to turn to the Government for relief. Human nature has remained about the same, and while the citizen with a hundred years or more of American blood in his veins may have improved along the line of self-control, the millions of immigrants, fresh from European tyranny and misrule, who have landed upon our shores in the last seventy-five years, render it doubtful whether we have advanced to the place where we can be certain that we are beyond the danger point of social convulsion and class hatred; and we find our Nation of ninety millions of people, the greatest and richest of earth, rent with jealousy and dissatisfaction, largely because no great, overshadowing national issue occupies the thought of the entire people.

This condition is the opportunity of the demagogue, the plague and curse of all ages,—and never has the field been so well cultivated as at the present time. As the overshadowing issues have passed, the personal equation has magnified until party lines are nearly effaced and men rather than great principles are the issue. The existence of government presupposes opposition; the child chafes under the restraint of home and school, and the adult under the laws that regulate his conduct. All of the forces of discontent created from whatever source, are but storage batteries of power, that can be discharged with fearful effect by him who would release them to serve his own pur