acter of that Justice. For fifteen years he was a member of the judiciary of the State, died within the year, in the full possession of all his faculties, at the age of 84 or 85 years; and while I do not complain of what has been said, I do complain that we of the local Bar have not done our duty in the premises. A full sketch was furnished by the committee of the Supreme Court, of which I was a member, and also one to the local Bar, and that material is within reach, and I would like unanimous consent, if that is a proper thing to do, to present at least this sketch-the one written by Judge Gilmore for insertion in the report the coming year.

Leave was granted as requested.

(See Appendix No. VII.)

The Tenth District was called.

JUDGE PIKE: Was not Mr. Perry Adams in this district? I would suggest that Mr. Rohn, of Tiffin, who was well acquainted with him, could say something about him.

MR. HARRIS: Mr. Rohn, who practiced law in the same county with Mr. Adams, was associated with him for years, and is a member of the Association. He has the material at the present time by which he can furnish the Association a sketch, and I have no doubt a very good sketch, of Mr. Adams. I would ask that the Association pass our report and give us further time to make a supplementary report, which will be submitted by Mr. Rohn.

Leave was granted.

(See Appendix No. IV.)

JUDGE BURKET: There is another very honorable name that seems to have been overlooked in the Tenth District, and that is the Hon. Asher Cook, of Perrysburg. I think he was a member in good standing. He died during the last year. He was probably one of the most distinguished members of the Bar in the Northwest. I simply want to mention the fact, so that it may not be overlooked. I have no material at hand by which I can say anything about him. There are perhaps those present who can. There ought to be a sketch furnished of his life.

THE PRESIDENT: I suggest that the gentlemen from the Tenth Judicial District have leave to insert in the volume of the reports a sketch of Mr. Cook.

Leave was granted so to do.

The Association adjourned to to-morrow morning.

SECOND DAY-MORNING SESSION.

The convention assembled at 10 o'clock, the President in the chair.

THE PRESIDENT: We are honored by the presence of one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. He has taken interest enough in our association to be with us to-day, and I now have the honor of presenting to you Mr. Justice Henry Billings Brown, of the Supreme Court of the United States.

MR. JUSTICE BROWN: Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Ohio Bar—I ought to thank the president of this association for recognizing the fact that a man who has spent seven or eight months in reading records and briefs and writing opinions, is not exactly in the proper frame of mind for spending his summer vacation in writing addresses, and hence for booking me for an informal address. I can assure you that my address will be so very informal that I hardly think you will consider that it rises to the dignity of an address at all. In short, I would prefer that it be called a talk.

I am very glad to meet my brethren of the Ohio bar, for I now consider that the members of the bar of the four states constituting the sixth judicial circuit of the United States are my brethren, and I have a right to call them so. I am doubly glad to meet them in this historic spot; for although I have lived for over thirty years within four hours' run of Put-in-Bay, I never sat foot upon the island until this week. I am glad to meet you, gentlemen, for I have a high regard for the Ohio bar. The state of Ohio has been justly called the modern mother of Presidents, besides being the mother of a great many men who ought to be President. She certainly has produced many eminent lawyers, and from the appointment of Mr. Justice McLean in 1829, up to the time of Justice Stanley Matthews' death in 1889, she has never failed to have from one to three members of the supreme bench of the United States. I am glad to notice the public interest that is being taken in the proceedings of these state bar associations. Most of them are of recent date, and they did not at first seem to command the active interest and sympathy of the profession. I, for one, shared the general apathy with regard to them; and I am ashamed to say, that while I have been in the habit of attending the

sessions of the American Bar Association, this is the first state bar association at which I have ever been present. I think the public is beginning to recognize in them a great factor, not only in the promotion of good fellowship among the members of the bar, but in their possible influence upon legislation, and upon the selection of competent men for judicial offices. I can hardly imagine the legislature of Ohio refusing to act upon the unanimous recommendation of this association, or passing a law which it shall adjudge to be ill-timed and unnecessary. The time has been, and I think still is, when the members of the bar are the leading members of the State legislatures, and I think that an official representation of the members of the bar such as this association is, ought to have a very great influence upon legislation. In fact, I believe that the demand of this age is for manly and fearless men, who have the interest of the profession and of the public at heart; who have the moral courage to call a spade a spade, and who are not so tied up by political and religious affiliations that they are afraid to speak their own minds in any assembly, however unpopular their ideas may be. The Bar Association of the City of New York, or of the State of New York, if it had no other title to fame than the stand it has taken with regard to two or three questions of public interest, and with regard to the appointment of two or three men, at different times, would have vindicated its right to existence, and established its claim to recognition and to the admiration of the community, by these very acts.

While the law is not progressive, in the sense in which medicine is called a progressive science; while we have nothing to compare with the remarkable progress which has been made in the useful arts, and which has so completely revolutionized society during the present century, yet when we compare the state of the law to-day with what it was when the constitution of the United States was adopted, we see that very material progress has been made-a progress which augurs well for the future. Even in the very principle of government there has been a change-a change that we have not been able to take advantage of by reason of the unalterable character of the constitution. When the constitution was adopted, it was supposed to embody the most advanced theories of a form of government. The very essence of that theory was that the executive should be separated from the legislative power. In his Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu stated it as a fundamental principle of politics that

the executive, the legislative and the judicial power should be entirely separate. But in the progress which has been made in the principles of government in the past hundred years, we have found that the tendency of all forms of government is now to merge, to a certain extent, the executive and the legislative powers, and to conduct the government by committees of the legislature. That has been found to work well. It redounds to the cause of freedom; it renders the Legislature responsive immediately to the wishes of the people; and where the ministry is defeated, it is considered to be its duty to resign. In other words, it is a government by a responsible ministry. In England it is required that the ministry be composed of members of Parliament. I believe the law is, that when a person takes office under the crown, he has to submit his claims again to a public vote. We are not able to adopt that system. Perhaps it is better that we are not. It has worked well in England; it has worked well on the Continet. The free countries of Europe are in fact governed by committees of the legislature. I don't say that that would be a proper system here. I don't know whether it would or not. But I have often thought that it would be an improvement on our present system if the members of the Cabinet had seats in the House, without a vote, and were permitted to present the views of the administration with regard to the conduct of government.

But let us look at some of the changes that have been made in our law. Take, for instance, the law of real estate. At the time of the adoption of the constitution, we were, at least in some of the States, living under the complex system of English tenures. You all know what that was, with its copyholds and its rent charges, its tithes and advowsons, its entails and its primogeniture, its fines and recoveries, which had grown up under the feudal system of holding land. What has become of it? It is all swept away, and real estate is now held by the simplest of tenures, and is transferred almost as easily as personal property.

My eye lighted the other day upon a statement by a writer in the American Law Review of the changes that had been made in the law of real property from the adoption of the constitution to the present time. At the risk of being a little prolix, I will give a statement of those changes: "Abolition of feudal tenure, including copyholds; abolition of tithes; making both the real and personal property of intestates descend to the same persons; enabling

parents to become heirs to their children; abolition of primogeniture, and preference of males in descent; making all estates descend in the same course, whether acquired by purchase or by descent from paternal or maternal relations; abolishing the preference of male stocks in descent; enabling half-blood relations to inherit; making husband and wife heirs to each other in case of failure of blood relations; making seisin of land pass by the mere delivery of the deed; the general registration of deeds; making a fee simple pass without the word "heirs" or any equivalent, where a less estate is not expressed; enabling tenants in tail to convey estates in fee simple without a fine or recovery; enabling married women to convey their estates, and bar their dower without a fine; change of joint tenancies into tenancies in common; removing the disabilities of alienage with regard to real property; abolition of the doctrine of tacking in mortgages; placing land mortgaged as well as the debt for which it is security at the disposal of the mortgagee's executor; making all real estate liable to execution for debt, and having it sold on execution, like personal property; shortening the time of limitation." There are no less than twenty-one specifications of the advance that has been made in the law of real estate alone. And when we see our simple system of registry of deeds, we can hardly understand how the great estates of England could be carried on, and transferred, and sold, and mortgaged, without some simple system by which public notice shall be given of such transactions. But we have yet a step to take in advance, and that is towards the Australian system. It is a curious fact that we are going to the antipodes for some of our most valuable changes of jurisprudence. We have taken their system of balloting and adopted it in a large number of States. We are now taking their system of holding land, which, as I understand it, is in the same way that stocks of a corporation are held; and while I know but very little about the system it strikes me with great favor. But as this is the subject of a separate address by my friend Mr. Fitch, who is to follow me, I will not dwell upon it longer.

In the law of personal property the changes have been less; the reason being that the law of personal property is founded upon immutable principles of justice. It is not an artificial system: it is an inheritance, really, from the civil law. And if you take our text-writers upon personal property and compare them with the Code of