His face spells pain-utter, ages old. His thin frame is clad with rusty black that shines with wear. His sallow cheeks start out with twin hectic spots of red. His pale eyes glint like new steel. His lips curl—fearless—defiant. It is the picture of a God-like weakling demanding man's justice for God's poorest creature. It is a picture of courage. It is a scene of true greatness. It is a Georgia lawyer, himself without friends abroad, and food at home, defending his brother miserable.

Laughter or tears! Cui bono?

INTERESTING AND HUMOROUS EXPERIENCES

AT THE BAR.

ADDRESS BY

HENRY C. HAMMOND,

OF AUGUSTA.

(Stenographically Reported.)

I am utterly miserable, my friends, and in a few minutes you will be. If there are any who want to go out, for the Lord's sake go; I am not going to try to stop you. (To the reporter:) Please do not write down anything that I say. If it were not for you stenographers, I would be the greatest judge in Georgia to-day. It is you fellows that are getting me into trouble all the time with the Supreme Court. (Laughter.)

My friends, I have attended many Bar Association meetings, but this is one of the most delightful I have ever attended in my life. I have never heard such a high-class lot of speeches as I have listened to here in all my life before. The splendid paper read by the President, the convincing oration of my friend, Rosser, the splendid speech made by Mr. Alston, and the great oration of the day made by our distinguished visitor, carrying us back into the realm of dim and distant precedent in jurisprudence, were all magnificent; but I did not really think that I would ever live to hear my praises sung as they were by my dear friend, Ellis. I know why he did it, though. A lawyer never does anything for another gratuitously, and I know why he did it. He took me to one side, and said: "Look here, Hammond, I understand you have heard something about me. Let me show you what I am going to say about you this afternoon. I will let you read this thing, and, if you will agree not to tell what you know about me in a certain matter, I will agree not to read this." I said, "I will not do it." Now, I want you to understand, my

friends, that I am not an original prohibitionist; but I regret to say that there are many contrivances by which the prohibition law is said to be defeated. They tell me in the City of Savannah-and I know it's true in Augusta—the whole foundations of the city have been undermined with excavations for storing liquor in barrels and bottles, and houses are caving in. But Mr. Ellis said he did not need anything of that sort, since he had a little still all his own, and by the use of a gas-jet he could make enough liquor to get a whole family drunk for a week. I give you that for the benefit of the Macon contingent, who might want to follow Mr. Ellis up. (Laughter.)

Understand, my friends, I am no humorist. You will know it for certain in a moment. I am a reformer, and the idea that my suggestions of reform should have been taken in this light and flippant way by the Association is a matter of great concern to me. (Laughter.) I have urged, and I still urge, such reforms (they seem a little radical, I admit) as the abolition of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. (Laughter.) I am willing to go on down the line, and I think that all the Superior Court judges now on the bench ought to be retired at double their present pay, and that incoming judges ought to be required to work eight hours a week, and no more.

My friends, I have always regarded our distinguished Secretary, Mr. Park, as a gentle, kindly, friendly man, sweet and amiable always; but you know Mr. Park has recently written a book. It reminds me somewhat of a book written by a young lady which was so naughty that her mother forbade her to read it. I do not know whether Mrs. Park has forbidden Mr. Park to read his book or not, but it is a highly interesting, though somewhat disconnected, treatise on the law of Georgia. It will never be read by anybody, I fear, but nevertheless it is a weighty work. I think it costs about fiftyeight pounds—no, I mean weighs about fifty-eight poundsoh, it is a monumental work. It is about as high as a monument, and about as broad, too. Of course, as I say, nobody would ever read this book, but we all have to buy it, and pay

for it. There have been other great Code writers, but, my friends, unquestionably, they have all been tyrants of the worst kind. Justinian and Napoleon were two of the greatest tyrants the world has ever known.

The suggestion was made, when I was asked to make this talk, that I see if I could not make an idiot of myself deliberately. I have done so only accidentally up to this time, but now it is a matter of deliberation with me. However, my friends, I have this serious suggestion to make to the Association. No wonder there was a demand here for something like humor. You talk about doctors, and undertakers, and the like, but we are engaged in the most terrible and distressing business of any men on earth. In the midst of wreck and ruin the lawyer is called upon like the wreckers who go out yonder to sea (and some say the wreckers generally get the wreck) (laughter), but, gentlemen, we are engaged in the most terrible, the most gruesome business. Nothing ever comes our way unless everything has gone wrong. We do need humor; we do need levity; and I do not think that any man at the Bar Association meeting ought to admit that he is a lawyer, or that he is a judge. Some of them do not have to admit it, of course, for they just know they are not (laughter), but for the Lord's sake, if there is any humor in our business, let us let it come to the surface, and forget the great and gloomy things which infest our daily life at the bar. Now, there are some humorous things which happen in the court room-things we laugh at-but it is only on account of the surroundings, only because everything is so terribly dull in the environment that we laugh at those things.

I know a man up in McDuffie County, and I would advise the members of the bar to follow his example. He has a continual smile on his face, laughs all the time, and wins more cases than anybody you ever saw, because he does not sail into everybody, fighting everybody and everything in sight. That fellow could teach Job a lesson in patience-and it pays. We have a great solicitor-general in Augusta. Oh, he is a big man, a great big man; he is big up and big all around;

he measures about seventy-two inches around; and he uses more wit and humor, and wins more cases, than any man I

ever saw.

I tell you, my friends, there is one thing I want to call your attention to and that is the utter lack of conception on the part of the ordinary man of what justice is. His mind cannot take it in; he cannot conceive of what justice is. That he should lay aside all matters of friendship and generosity and kindness and do justice is something he cannot master. And, when we expect a jury to do that, we expect them to do an impossible thing. We expect the juror to carry a burden which he cannot sustain. That reminds me of what an old friend of mine told me the other day. Said he: "Judge, I never would go on the grand jury, if it was not to serve my friends." (Laughter.) The other day we were holding court up in Columbia County. A lot of negroes up there got into a fight, and finally one of them was indicted for trying to murder another one. I could not help thinking in that case of the awful ignorance of juries. They are brought into the court room where everything is new to them, where they are unacquainted with the terms used-they have no conception of them, and they are turned loose to pass on these matters. You all know the story of the jury that went out and after a long time returned, when the judge said to them, “Have you agreed on a verdict, gentlemen of the jury?" They said, "Yes, your honor, we know what we want to decide, but we do not know how to write the verdict." "What is the trouble?" asked the court. "We want to know, your honor, who is the plaintiff and who defendant." They do not even understand those terms that we are all so much accustomed to. They have no idea about things. And the same thing is true of many other terms, and I feel so sorry for a poor jury, when they go out to decide a case. The door closes on them, and a knotty question is handed over to them to decide, and no help from any source can come in to them. Oh! I feel awful sorry for them. I sympathized very much with a certain jury that went out and stayed two days. They were called back,