The chase this year is short.

In Tennessee the public welfare has not been deemed to require any addition to the 1,500 pages of statute law enacted at the regular session of 1903, whose most noteworthy provisions were communicated in the President's address of last year. Since that time our hall of legislation, as

"Some banquet hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead,"

has been desolate of law-makers; its echoes silent to the voice of their eloquence and wisdom.

In national legislation there is likewise no harvest of changes to reward the toil of the gleaner, for although the Fifty-eighth Congress has since our last meeting passed 264 acts and adopted thirty-eight joint resolutions, they relate almost entirely to the every-day administration of national affairs and make virtually no changes in either the body of substantive Federal law or the procedure of the Federal Courts.

Amid this multiplicity of enactments there is much of interest from the point of view of the citizen, but little that immediately concerns the lawyer.

The results of the Spanish War, the new obligations devolved upon the nation with her recently acquired dominions and the growth of our distant territories, appear not only in sundry appropriations for the expenses of insular administration, but in an Act which carries into effect the convention of December, 1902, with the Republic of Cuba, by providing for the admission into the United States, free of duty, of various Cuban products. and a reduced and preferential duty upon others; a shipping Act. which provides, under heavy penalty, that after July 1, 1906, no merchandise, except army or navy supplies, and no passengers shall be transported between the United States and the Philippines in any other than a vessel of the United States; this, however, not to affect any privilege guaranteed to Spanish ships or merchandise by the Treaty of Paris; an Act-in pursuance of the power expressly reserved to Congress in the establishment of the government of the Territory of Hawaii-confirming Acts of the Hawaiian Legislature granting electric light and power and gas franchises in Hawaii; a joint resolution authorizing the Secre

tary of War to transport in government transport vessels from Porto Rico to the United States and return, six hundred Porto Rican public school teachers, for attendance upon the various summer schools of the United States; and various Acts providing for the appointment of road overseers, the creation of road districts and the care of insane persons in Alaska, with a special appropriation for the instruction of Alaskan natives in the care of reindeer and the introduction of reindeer from Siberia for do

mestic purposes.

The modern trend towards international agreements and the mitigation of the evils of unavoidable war, is indicated by joint resolutions inviting the interparliamentary union for the promotion of international arbitration to hold its next session in the United States; requesting the President to negotiate with Great Britain for a revision of the regulations governing the taking of fur seals, and desiring the President to bring about an understanding between the principal maritime powers, incorporating into the permanent law of civilized nations the principle of the exemption of all private property at sea, not contraband of war, from capture or destruction by belligerents.

The beneficent action of Congress in extending the park system of Washington and continually increasing the beauty of the world's most beautiful city-making it a national model for all cities of dusty, narrow streets, that have neither small parks nor tree-shaded boulevards, nor place of refuge for the children reared in tenements or flats and thwarted of their birthright of grass and sunshine, whose only playground is in the dirt and disease of the street-appears in various Acts for the condemnation of land within the District of Columbia for widening streets, building small parks and the like.

The fostering care given by the National Government to education and agriculture and the promotion of various worthy public enterprises, is shown in the incorporation of the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the purpose of encouraging investigation, research and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind, with specific authority to manage the funds transferred for that purpose by Andrew Carnegie-the chief public administrator of the surplus wealth of our country; a provision for participation by the Government in the Industrial

Exposition to be held next year in Portland to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the exploration of the Oregon country by Lewis and Clark; an appropriation of $500,000 for eradicating contagious diseases of animals, the Mexican cotton boll weevil and other insects and diseases affecting cotton; an Act enabling the Secretary of War to permit the erection of a lock and dam in aid of navigation in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga; an Act providing for the free transportation through the mails, under certain conditions, of reading matter in raised characters for the use of the blind; and an Act amending the charter granted in 1903 to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, so as to permit the holding of its biennial meeting outside of Washington, an enactment which might perhaps have been styled, not inappropriately, an Act for the diffusion of public spirit and oratory throughout the United States.

Straws that show a gently blowing wind, laden with the soft incense of peace and fraternal good-will, are the National appropriations for the care of the "Confederate Mound" in Oakwood Cemetery, Chicago, and the reconstruction of the stone wall enclosing the Confederate Cemetery at Camp Chase, Ohio.

None of the foregoing legislation, however, affects in the slightest degree either the general rules of law or its administration.

Of statutes directly affecting the administration of the law there are only three. Two of these relate to records and papers in the General Land Office, and can have no application in Tennessee. The third provides that the term of the United States Circuit and District Courts held at Knoxville shall, for the present, commence on the first Monday in March of each year, instead of the second, as heretofore, and this little statutory fox is all that I have run to ground at the end of all my patient trailing, and this I now have the honor to communicate to the Bar Association of Tennessee, in annual meeting duly assembled, as the only noteworthy change that has been made within the last year in statute law, either State or Federal.

Having exhausted my constitutional duty, may I not now exercise the privilege-not, I trust, excluded by constitutional implication from the scope of this address of briefly calling your

renewed and emphasized attention to the progress of a movement that is the strongest single force to-day in helpful statute-making tnroughout the land, and in the promotion of those improvements in the administration of the law whose attainment is the chief object of this Association, the movement for the promotion of uniformity of legislation throughout the United States.

Under our Federal Constitution, uniting in a manner unprecedented in the world's history, strength with liberty, through the union of National sovereignty in Federal affairs with the self-government of sovereign States in matters of domestic concern-"a method which," as has been said, "so well combines Roman power with Saxon freedom”—much diversity in State legislation is not only inevitable, but in matters of purely local concern, desirable.

In few matters, however, of our daily life are we governed by the Federal law, which, concerned only with the broad outlines of national life, except in a few penal statutes mainly relating to the protection of the national revenues and currency, deals little with the citizen's ordinary relationships and business concerns; "hardly touching," as has been said, "the edge of that vast body of municipal law by whose rules society governs its actions;" so that, in most matters of every day conduct, not merely in the restraint of violence and wrong by criminal laws, but in our immediate and closest personal concerns; in our marriages and our divorces, our partnerships and our corporations, our deeds and our wills, our contracts and our trade, and well nigh all the manifold and complicated relationships of family, neighborhood and citizenship we are governed almost entirely by the laws of our respective States.

With the Legislatures of half a hundred States and Territories, in addition to Congress, almost continuously engaged in the creation of statute law, much diversity and contrariety is inevitable, and to this interstate diversity must be added the variety of law within each State.

"We are," writes Frederick J. Stimson, in a learned and scholarly paper on "Uniform State Legislation," read before the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which has been my chief source of information in the preparation of this address, "living under a fourfold system of law; there is in every

State, (1) the common law of the State as interpreted by its courts; (2) the common law as interpreted by the United States Courts; (3) the statutes of the State, and (4) the statutes of the. United States;" and, we might ourselves add, the varying interpretations of these dual statutes by these dual courts.

From the complexityy of elements incident to this dual system there must inevitably sometimes result confusion and misapprehension, like unto that which, according to the genial Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, results when ordinary John and Thomas are talking together, on account of the six different personalities that he declares take part in such a dialogue, namely: The three Johns: the real John, known only to his Maker; John's ideal John, often very unlike the real John; and Thomas' ideal John, often unlike either the real John or John's John: and the three Thomases: the real Thomas; Thomas' ideal Thomas and John's ideal Thomas.

To this must be added the diversity between the several States.

An initial diversity existed, as Mr. Stimson has pointed out, even in the original thirteen States; their inherited body of English laws in existence at the time of the Declaration of Independence being even then somewhat complex and consisting of the common law of England so far as each State had adopted it either tacitly or by express statute; the statutes of Great Britain which they had either tacitly or expressly adopted; and the colonial statutes or ordinances themselves, the latter relating, it is true, chiefly to Indian affairs and finances rather than to general law, but, as in the inheritance of land, varying from the rule of primogeniture in several colonies and the gift of a double portion to the eldest son in Massachusetts to the present system, first adopted by Georgia, in which all children share equally; the most important of these colonial statutes being the Massachusetts "Body of Liberties," containing twenty-one sections styled "Laws concerning liberties, more particularly concerning freemen," of which four concerned the "liberties of children," four "of servants," four "of foreigners." and only two the "liberties of women."

In the adoption of the common law of England there has been great diversity. In thirty States it has been expressly adopted by statutes phrased in more or less general terms; in two there is