ADDRESS OF WILLIAM B. PETTIT, President of the Association. Gentlemen of the Virginia State Bar Association: To have been elected President of this Association is an honor to be proud of, and one which is so much the more prized by me because I feel that warm and generous friendship, much more than a sense of the possession by me of any peculiar qualification for the position, suggested and dictated my selection. For this honor, so bestowed, I beg to tender you the expression of my highest appreciation and sincerest thanks. To the study and the practice of the law my life has been chiefly devoted. According to my conception, the law is the embodiment and expression of what is just, reasonable, and right. I love the science of jurisprudence, and may, not inaptly, employ the quaint language of a seventeenth century author to emphasize my admiration of its sublime principles. "Notwithstanding," said he, "the hard-favored objections which some men cast upon it, I really think the study of the law to be the most pleasant study in the world. And he which delighteth in the study of any other art or science must consequently be delighted with this. For the knowledge of the law, as Doddridge saith, is most truly styled Rerum Divinarum humanarumque scientia, and worthily imputed to be the science of sciences, for therein lies hid the knowledge of every other learned science." To what nobler secular subject can any man's life be devoted? The fact is not to be disguised that lawyers are mainly respon |