The Bar as an Institution of the State Page: 7
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-7far-reaching
doctrine, as the brilliant advocate whose genius first
comprehended it and whose argument compelled its adoption.
This is peculiarly a critical age. We hear very little of praise
of anybody or anything. That old-fashioned reverence for
what, as children, we were taught to believe had in the providence
of God extended the frontiers of freedom and bestowed
the blessings of a larger liberty upon mankind, has largely gone
out of fashion. Science is dissatisfied with religion and contests
the truth of its divine inspiration. Industrialism, instead
of an agency for betterment, has become a kind of menace in
its huge proportions, and is found in constant struggle with the
authority of the Government. A general skepticism pervades
the air. Faith in established institutions or what we have
hitherto thought were established institutions, is no longer popular.
The man who has found something to criticize or somebody
to proscribe seems to quickly gain and easily hold the
public ear and to be always assured of a large and sympathetic
audience. We are daily invited to be at war with out past,
displeased with the present and doubtful as to the future. To
read some of the current maledictions of the time one would
imagine that as applied to this period the Declaration of Independence
was intended to secure as an inalienable right, not
the pursuit of happiness, but the enjoyment of discontent.
An unfailing characteristic of a complex civilization, such as we
have attained to, is not only the problems it evolves, but the
ready abandonment by many men even of those fundamental
ideas in which the Nation had its origin and by which the form
of its government is distinguished, and their eager resort for
the relief of public ills to experimental theories, whose very
speciousness in promise generally proclaims their worthlessness
in practice. We have reached that stage where the power of
government is becoming the chief dependence of our national
life; and that elder faith in the capacity of the people to control
within the spheres of individual life and action most of the
things that concern them, is largely supplanted by a reliance
in statutes whose infinite variety will be marked by the future
historian as one of the wonders of the age. The conditions of
inequality which unfortunately exist to a grave degree in the
purely industrial sections of the country are arraigned not only
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Texas Bar Association. The Bar as an Institution of the State, book, July 2, 1913; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth38099/m1/8/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.