tions so long
that it would appear almost cruel now to undertake, or to ask a change.
We have noted further, and this is the saddest of all, that our
inactivity in claiming our rights, or our indifference about their
recognition, has not only emboldened our enemies, but it has silenced
our friends.

We have seen with increasing alarm the judicial construction of statutes
and the Constitution itself, which all but vitiate and annul the basis
of our citizenship; we have seen repeated attempts made to discredit the
War amendments to the national Constitution, and some have in all
seriousness gone so far even as to question their constitutionality.
Every student of our common law has always been sure of the right to
private property, and the corollaries thereto, but it is just in the
present year that a court of last resort in a neighboring State, in an
interpretation of one of these new conceptions, a segregation ordinance,
declared that while the one under investigation was invalid, that the
municipality enacting it might under its police powers make provision
for the segregation of the races in the matter of their residences,
schools, churches, and places of public assembly. The law is not a fixed
science; it is more properly growth, a development. What is not regarded
as law to-day may, by the inactivity or indifference of those most
deeply concerned, become the law of the next decade. So we behold to-day
our rights and liberties drifting away from us, and that regarded as the
law which years ago we deemed impossible. What are we to do, you say?
What can we do? The lawyers trained here and in other institutions of
learning must answer these questions, and in finding their answers will
be their opportunity. The adjudication of the conflicting interests of
mankind, the interpretation of our statutes and our common law the
determination of rights and privileges of all men, is a judicial
function. What rights we enjoy to-day have come in the final analysis
from the courts. What rights we find ourselves to-day deprived of, and
which we hope to enjoy to-morrow, must come, if at all, from the same
source. The courts have the last word, and it is to that instrument of
government we must appeal, and to that last word we must look for our
safety, or fear our doom. But courts are not self-acting institutions,
and they are not engaged in academic discussions of abstractions. They
are severely serious. It may be that, like so many A