hardest blow has been delivered.

The act survived the name,

and it will survive the less serious but more formal attacks.

I realize that a judge with right to express his opinion on the facts of the case was an element in that trial by jury which received the encomiums quoted from Blackstone and Mr. Choate. And trial by jury, even when so constituted, deserved the tributepaid it, especially as compared with modes of trial previously existing, or any mode of trial proposed as a substitute.

But the jury trial, of which a judge, vested with the right to express his opinion on the facts, is an element, does not measure up to the high ideal of a trial by a jury composed of twelve intelligent and upright men taken from the mass of an enlightened citizenry to which they return as soon as their work of administering justice in some particular case, or cases is discharged, and who are consecrated and set apart from the rest of the world and its disturbing influences, and who, during the progress of the cause, fuse their twelve individualities into one quickened and stimulated intelligence, which, realizing that it is the sole and exclusive judge of the facts of the case, grapples every particle of testimony as it comes from the witness stand, and holds it, until the judge, at the conclusion of the evidence, gives them the law in charge, which they receive with unquestioning reverence, and which they apply to the evidence with such precision and accuracy as to astound those who regard scholastic learning and a knowledge of formal logic as a prerequisite to the power of sustained, correct and strictly logical reasoning. Of a verdict made by twelve men so selected, consecrated and set apart and so instructed, well might Judge Bleckley affirm, that it was a compound of law, evidence and logic.

A system of jury trials that permits the judge to express his opinion upon the facts, however its advocates may insist that this is altogether different from allowing the court to direct the finding upon issues of fact, unless the jurors come to a demoralizing realization of the judge's fallibility, will become a system for making verdicts by one man instead of twelve. This may be

considered bald assertion, but in this position I am supported by many who favor such a system and those who oppose it. Prof. Robertson of the former class consoles him for the painful shortcomings of jurors with the reflection "that while the jury are in legal theory supposed to be absolute masters of questions of fact, in practice, they are largely controlled by the judge.”

That rarely gifted jurist and thinker, Judge Nisbet, declared, in delivering the opinion in Anderson's case, 2 Kelly 380, that "such is the reverence of our people for the courts of justice, and so profound is their respect for the law as administered to them by the court, that, in my judgment, the opinion merely on the facts of the incumbent who has the confidence of the juries would in nine case in ten control their verdicts." In Holder v. Th: State, 5 Ga. 442, he repeats his conviction and says, "In practice it controls the verdict in nine cases in ten. It therefore defeats the right of trial by jury as guaranteed by the Constitution."

Believing that this proposed reform is a constant menace to an institution, sacred and of vital importance, I have raised my feeble protest and sought to strengthen it by the sanction of great names.

If I err, I do not walk alone in darkness.

If I am sometimes abashed by the smile of those who "sit in the seat of the scornful," my soul is strengthened and my faith is restored by the words of the great jurist, who for years, both before and after 1850, adorned the bench of our supreme court, uttered with the solemnity of profound conviction, long after the passing of the so-called "Dumb Act," declaring that "to the credit of juries it may be said that they are always right on questions of liberty and public right." And if in such weighty matters as these they are always right, who would deny their capacity and disposition to dispense justice, pure and undefiled, in causes of less importance, involving only the matter of dollars, dimes and cents.

THE BIOLOGICAL LAW OF INFANCY.

ADDRESS BY WALTER B. HILL, LL.D., CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN :—The invitation of the Executive Committee to address you at this meeting found me in a mood of willingness to respond, and yet of consciousness that the first year of my transfer from legal to educational work would be a very busy year, and so I accepted the invitation upon the express condition that the contribution expected from me should be a very modest and informal one. This is stated, not by way of apology, but merely of explanation. This brief and unpretentious paper is not the measure of my wishes, but only of my opportunity and of my engagement with the committee.

THE BIOLOGICAL LAW OF INFANCY.

It would be surprising if my work in the University had not given me new points of view relative to some of the principles which I had so long studied as a lawyer. I invite your attention briefly to the Law of Infancy-as seen in parallax from my former station in the legal profession and my present view-point in education.

If you will place a drop of impure water under the microscope you will see an enormous multiplication of life going on. The tiny creatures swimming about in the liquid seem to divide as you look-one cell becoming two cells-and the two seem to be so near the same in size and activity that you do not know which is the original and which is the derivative. The new-born creatures seem adapted from the moment of their origin to live and move and have their being in as complete a fashion as during their later and brief existence. This is Infancy at the lowest scale of life.

At the opposite end of the scale stands man-the crown and climax of creation. The child has an extended history as an embryo in which he repeats the story of age-long evolutions; he comes into the world the most helpless of all creatures-the only creature born so helpless and so undeveloped that without fostering care he has not even the possibility of continued life; and he enters upon a period of growth which requires a longer time than is required of any other creature to fit him into the environment on which he has entered. This is Infancy at the highest scale of life.

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Between these two extremes is the sum total of animate existence, extending from the most simple to the most complex types. Throughout the whole scale of being the same law holds good which is suggested by contrasting the two extremes, viz. that the period of immaturity, and therefore of development, within which the creature progressively becomes adapted to its surroundings and fitted to discharge its functions and live its life, is directly proportionate to the complexity of the organism. This is the biological law of Infancy, admirably formulated in the writings of Mr. John Fiske. I wish you to-day to consider that law in its connection with the familiar professional conceptions that would come into your mind if you saw in a law book or a decision that phrase--"the law of Infancy."

MEANING OF INFANCY IN EDUCATION.

It has been said by high authority in the world of education that "the meaning of the period of helplessness, or infancy, lies at the bottom of any scientific and philosophical understanding of the part played by education in human life. Infancy is a period of plasticity: it is a period of adjustment: it is a period of fitting the organism to its environment. This fitting of the organism to its environment on the larger and broader scale is the field of education. . . . The child reaches its physical adolescence by the age of fifteen years. By that time it has learned to enter physically upon its sphere of activity; but there yet remains to be accomplished an adjustment to the spiritual

sphere--the building of harmonious and reciprocal relations with those great acquisitions of the race that constitute civilization. Our art, our science, our literature, our institutions and our religious life are an integral part, indeed an essential part of our environment. They are the great spiritual possessions of the race. Education is the adjustment of the selfacting organism to this vast series of hereditary acquisitions."

LEGAL RULE OF INFANCY-ITS SIGNIFICANCE.

Now the precise point to which I have been leading up is this: The law which we revere as the perfection of reason has entered up its judgment on the subject of the proper length of this period of immaturity, of disability, and of preparation for life, and has fixed the period of infancy at twenty-one years. This is the crystallized common sense of that system which is the greatest monument of the progressive wisdom of mankind-the common law--that the child, the youth, the young man, if you will so call him, belongs to the family and the school and the college up to his legal majority: and that the preceding period is properly devoted to his preparation to enter as a worker in the business of the world and as a citizen into the State. It follows from this that every boy who through the accidents or misfortunes of life or through the unwisdom or parsimony of his parents or his own undue eagerness, is thrust or thrusts himself into life without having his period of legal immaturity spent in preparation-in education--is defrauded of his birthright: is cheated out of a great privilege which the wisdom of the common law itself has pointed out as appropriately filling the first twenty-one years of life.

INFLUENCE OF THE BAR ON PUBLIC OPINION.

Now, why do I come to you, brethren of the bar, with this plea for the recognition of the law of Infancy? It is because I appreciate your unique influence in the State. When I was one of the guild, I realized the fact of the preeminence of the bar as a factor in the formation of public opinion; but I could