was in conflict with the Constitution. But I suppose with few and rare exceptions all thoughtful students and patriotic Americans are glad that the Constitution has been so interpreted, and are glad also that the necessity for this judicial interposition has been so frequent and that the Court has been so sparing and scrupulous in the exercise of this great power. If we look at this judicial power not as it bears upon immediate and temporary and fleeting conditions, but as it affects the steady, permanent, and slow growth of the country, we shall find that the effect of the declaration by the Court that an attempted exercise of the legislative or executive power is a violation of our written Constitution is only to require pause, reconsideration, slowness of procedure in accomplishing what the popular will shall desire. The permanent, settled will, the sober second thought of a great people will make its way in the end either by changing the Constitution or by changing the construction.

Fourth. The lawyer should study the law with the constant purpose to do what he can to amend and perfect it. Every State and Territory, and nearly everywhere every county should have its Bar Association, whose function should be not only to maintain good fellowship, to preserve the highest standard of professional honor, learning, and capacity, but also to make its power felt in the amendment of jurisprudence and in keeping the law constantly abreast of the growing needs and the intelligent public sentiment of the country. But in this matter the ten volumes of the Reports of the State Bar Association of Virginia furnish abundant evidence that you require no advice and need no spur.

God forbid that anything should so change the temper of the American people as to destroy that healthy and eager discontent, alive to existing evil, constantly yearning for an ideal perfection always to be approached if never to be attained. This is the secret of greatness and of glory. But we need to be taught the lesson of which the American lawyer is the best possible teacher that everything which is permanent is of slow growth.

The mushroom, which grows in a night, perishes in a day, while the oak slowly adds ring to ring through its centuries of life. I hope that our people will be taught this lesson by the American Bar, especially in dealing with their Constitution. We may make changes of mere mechanism like that which grew out of the contested election between Jefferson and Burr; we may make new securities for individual right like those which followed immediately after the adoption of the Constitution, and those which followed the war. But let us hold fast to the substance of this wonderful structure the like of which the world never yet saw, and the equal of which it is not likely to see again until the experience not of a year, not of a presidential term, not of a single generation, but at least of a century, has demonstrated that it has failed.

In submitting what I have had to say to the considerate judgment of the Bar of Virginia, I have spoken freely and plainly as is due to my own self-respect and as becoming one speaking to such an audience. I have spoken in behalf of a tribunal whose constitutional judgments upon the greatest questions with which it has ever had to deal have overthrown, baffled, and brought to naught the policy in regard to the great matter of reconstruction of the party to which I myself belong, and the school of politics in which I have been trained and which, I suppose, was also that of a majority of the American people. I submit. I believe that the example of such submission is better and promises more for the continued life of the Republic than any party success, or than the prevalence of any special policy. The life and the glory of this country are to depend not on armies or navies, not on wealth, not on victory, not on empire, not on commerce, not on numbers, but upon the sentiments which govern the individual citizen-above all, on the sentiment which it is the function of our profession to inculcate that of obedience to law. The one most sublime thing in the universe, except its Creator, is that of a great and free people governing itself by a law higher than its own desire.

In that sublime pathway it was the function of Virginia to be the leader in the early days. That leadership may still be hers. Whatever may be the influences that determine the future of a great State the strongest of all is its own history. The Virginian youth, bred to the contemplation of her mighty past and to form himself upon the great models she has furnished in every generation, can secure for himself and for her a power over the future of the Republic to which her own past alone can furnish a parallel. What Virginia helped win for us; what Virginia helped build for us, let Virginia defend for us, let Virginia preserve for us. And the leader of three millions shall be the leader of a hundred millions.

PAPER

BY

BEV. T. CRUMP,

of the Richmond Bar.

THE GUARDIAN AD LITEM.

Gentlemen of the Virginia State Bar Association:

One of the first figures that a young lawyer meets with when becoming acquainted with proceedings in courts, especially in that large branch of present practice known as friendly proceedings in chancery, is the guardian ad litem. This personage is, I think, to most of them, at first rather an unknown quantity, and inspires both respect and awe. As we gain with the passage of years in practice and experience, some of the best members of the Bar occasionally fail to pay proper respect and give a sufficient amount of influence to this official personage.

In selecting the guardian ad litem for infants as the subject of this paper, I had at first thought it would be an easy matter to trace his origin, and that I would be compelled to deal largely with what might seem to you dry matters of practice. I find, however, that his origin and growth in our law is by no means plain, and his appointment by the courts goes back to the misty beginnings of the old English law. The necessity for some such officer as the guardian ad litem is likely also to continue for all time to come, certainly as long as civil litigation continues, and our ancient institution of the Bar remains a permanent necessity, which we trust will be at least until the millennium.

However precocious the American youth may be, the divine ordinances of nature will scarcely permit that he shall be freed

from the shackles of the law as the gentler sex-fractionally known as our better half-has been. And I think it can be asserted, without danger of refutation, that infants will continue, to the end of all time in this world, to come and go. The lament of Virginia's greatest law teacher over the assault on the family altar, and the rending asunder of that unity of husband and wife consecrated by Divine sanction and for centuries recognized by human law, will never be pronounced over the extinction of the guardian ad litem. This institution, then, which has always been and must ever remain with us lawyers, is worthy of some consideration.

The guardian ad litem, as commonly understood in our days, has none of the powers and none of the functions of the guardian of an infant, as that term is accepted in the law. A guardian is appointed for an infant, either to have the custody and control of his person, or to have the management of his property. The guardian ad litem has neither. He is a person appointed by the court, whether at common law or in equity, to defend and protect the interests of an infant defendant in proceedings to which the infant has been made a party, either because of his interests in the property involved, or because of some specific complaint directed against him. While this is true, the person so appointed has always been denominated a guardian, and such appointment by the courts is mentioned by the earliest law writers.

Those forefathers, as we may justly call them, of the law of ancient Britain, such as Fleta, Granville, Bracton, and Britton, devote much space to the treatment of guardians. This arose naturally out of the fact that the law which they were dealing with was mainly feudal law, with its chief features of the tenure of land and service to the knight or lord. The guardian played an important part in those old days, for the reason that the male infant was to have his lands kept for him, so that on reaching age he could continue to render the services that had been rendered by his ancestors to his lord and to his king. Out of this