We have fair authority for the most extreme form of healthy criticism. Mr. Justice Brown declared that the decision in the income tax case would rise up some day in the hour of danger to paralyze the arm of the government.

Mr. Justice Harlan declared in the insular decision, that the constitution, by the opinion of the majority, had been so mutilated as to convert a constitutional government into a government of legislative absolutism.

Mr. Jefferson was right when he said of certain classes of the judiciary that there was no restraint upon them except the fear of impeachment, and that impeachment was not even a "bugaboo."

The ancient remedy of decapitation, referred to by our distin guished president in his address, was salutary and effectual, but had one great defect-it cut off the opportunity of reform on the part of the judge. While furnishing the most powerful, free criticism supplies at the same time the most humane remedy.

I have no grievance against the woolsack of Georgia, and no local dissatisfaction colors my judgment. Measuring my words, I believe that the Georgia judiciary presents the most stainless type of the high office that has ever, as a whole, blessed a Stat of this Union.

I yield to none in my respect for our able and distinguished. judiciary. It has been a frequent bulwark between the aggression of wrong, and the security of right. We crown its righteous judgments with encomiums; shall we not set the seal of disapproval on the wrong? Have you ever thought of whom you are sometimes asked to clothe with the reverence of superstition? Reverence is the homage due to infallibility. Courts have not always been infallible.

Nisi prius courts in America have enjoined the gathering of citizens, have enjoined their conversation, have enjoined their passage along the public highways; and, out-Heroding Herod, have even prohibited the discontinuance of labor by employees, and punished for contempt the absent, until they have made the phrase "government by injunction" a synomym of moder tyranny.

Cross-burdened, thorn-pierced, a man-God tottered to His martyrdom, but the tragedy which crimsoned Calvary and saved a world was not a murder, it was a court's decree. Yet Pilate wore the ermine, and therefore shall no man say him nay? The judgments of courts fed the hungry flames with the food of martyred bodies. The compressed agony and tears of an age of Inquisition decorate the memory of the medieval bench.

The constitutionality of the infamous stamp act was affirmed by an American tribunal, and history shows that, unless the spirit of liberty had then been fixed in the colonial heart with strength divine, it would have been strangled from the bench.

Mrs. Surratt's wronged soul stands in the shadow to be reckoned with; while the cheek of Dreyfus-shamed France yet burns from the bewigged infamy of a court.

Not monstrous, but momentous and startling, is the reflection that, within a decade, overturning the precedents of a century, the high court of America, by a bare majority of one, protected the incomes of the rich, forced the most direful panic of the country's history, and paralyzed the arm of the government in the hour of danger; and, more startling still, out of the constitution of a republic has construed an empire and, exchanging the ermine for the imperial purple, has dealt a blow to freedom more dangerous than the allied armies of all the monarchs of the earth.

You may have tranquillity, it is true, and silence also, in the presence of justice and wrong alike. But the tranquillity that turns its placid face toward injustice is but the mask of decay, and within the false shell the worm feeds on the core of virtue.

You may receive the words of power-fortressed wrong with silence, but I say to you, that this silence is not the homage of honor. It is the silence of the sepulchre, yawning for its victims of human right and justice, against whose cruel mouth cowardice shall roll the stone that keeps them captive.

Who among those criticized, when such criticism is honest, objects? Fear of its white light is proclamation that a sore festers in the shadow. I know of no more worthy censor-body, endowed

with such learning, independence and virtue, before whom the conduct of courts could come, than the body of the bar. The very partisanship of advocacy, while it should never father unjust opinions from professional disappointment, lends that vital spark of interest needed to insure industrious scrutiny of the bench. But it must not be supposed that the bar, from its close contact therewith, is the only class deeply concerned in administration of the courts. When their property and their persons may be the fortunate or ill-starred grist with which the judicial mill grinds out justice or injustice; when, not only their private affairs are thus to be determined, but when these powerful tribunals hold in their hands the very structure and form of the government itself, under which the people live; when out of a court of nine, which is not even bound by its own decisions, five may make a fact and the minority of four only make an opinion; when the creature of a political body becomes the arbiter of ques tions which control, not only its material rights, but its political policy and life, men of the race which shed its best blood that this government might be born have the right to be heard.

In the name of the spirit of a conservative and law-abiding race, may the executive, legislative and judicial agents of the people receive from their principal, that same people, the fair-won guerdon of true respect. But may no false sense of conservatism strangle the voice of honest indignation or still the note of just alarm. May the lesson be learned and remembered, that the creature of the human, like the creature of a god, can never be greater than its own creator; that, as the officers of government for good service and high deeds receive the plaudits of the governed, so no perversion of place or power, no incompetency, misconduct or tyranny of rulers shall ever go unwhipt in the open forum of the world by those free subjects of that rule who are, at last, the highest sovereigns.

ཏ། །།།།།་་,!་

APPENDIX J.

DEFECTS IN THE LAW OF GEORGIA REGULATING PRIVATE CORPORATIONS.

PAPER BY SHEPARD BRYAN, OF ATLANTA.

The Code of Georgia, section 1833, declares: "A public corporation is one having for its object the administration of a portion of the powers of government delegated to it for that purpose such are municipal corporations," and section 1834 affirms that "All others are private, whether the object of incorporation be for public convenience or individual profit, and whether the purpose be in its nature, civil, religious or educational."

The Constitution of Georgia (article 3, section 7, paragraph 18) provides that the General Assembly shall have no power to grant corporate powers and privileges to private companies, but charges it with the duty of prescribing by law the manner in which such powers shall be exercised by the courts. It is further provided in this clause of the Constitution that all corporate powers and privileges to banking, insurance, railroad, canal, navigation, express and telegraph companies shall be issued and granted by the Secretary of State in such manner as shall be prescribed by law.

In pursuance of these mandates of the Constitution, laws have been enacted prescribing the manner in which the Secretary of State and the courts shall exercise the powers conferred upon them.

It is not my purpose to discuss in this paper the whole domain of our law touching these private corporations. I desire to refer more especially to the laws regulating the ordinary business

corporation and to point out certain additions and changes which in my judgment are needed and would prove useful to our commercial and industrial interests.

The railroad commission, the insurance department, the treasury department, with its State Bank Examiner, have done good service in behalf of the people. Since there have been railroads and legislatures, the railroad has been the prolific source of legislation. Many good laws have been placed upon our statute books, and the lawmakers on the whole have held a just and even balance between these gigantic combinations of capital on the one hand and the people whom they serve on the other. The Railroad Commission for the public good might well be granted other and additional powers (particularly with reference to the building of depots adequate to the needs of the city or community served). But this is not within the range of my subject.

Our insurance laws-ably and intelligently enforced as they are by the distinguished Insurance Commissioner are a credit. to the State. They have, however, serious defects and need amendment. The Secretary of State, empowered and directed by law, granted a charter to a mutual fire insurance company. This company should then have gone to the other side of the capitol and applied to the Insurance Department for license to do business in the State of Georgia. This was not done, and this company, although unable to do business in the State which created it, masquerades throughout this country and Canada as an honest Georgia corporation and collects premiums from an innocent public without giving protection in return therefor. Our law, then, has created and turned loose a "wild cat," and the many policyholders who have suffered loss by fire, come to Georgia to collect their money and find that Georgia will create a "wild cat" to prey upon the people of other States while protecting its own people from these depredations. The law should be so amended that this condition could not be possible, and the charter should be revoked unless a license is applied for and granted within sixty days after the granting of the charter.