that age. The number appointed is, of course, exceedingly few, and
the honor so high that it is held an offset to the additional term of
service which follows, and though a judge's appointment may be
declined, it rarely is. The term is five years, without eligibility to
reappointment. The members of the Supreme Court, which is the guardian
of the constitution, are selected from among the lower judges. When a
vacancy in that court occurs, those of the lower judges, whose terms
expire that year, select, as their last official act, the one of their
colleagues left on the bench whom they deem fittest to fill it."

"There being no legal profession to serve as a school for judges," I
said, "they must, of course, come directly from the law school to the
bench."

"We have no such things as law schools," replied the doctor, smiling.
"The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system of
casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of
society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the
plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the
existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men
to one another is now simpler, beyond any comparison, than in your
day. We should have no sort of use for the hair-splitting experts who
presided and argued in your courts. You must not imagine, however,
that we have any disrespect for those ancient worthies because we have
no use for them. On the contrary, we entertain an unfeigned respect,
amounting almost to awe, for the men who alone understood and were
able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of property,
and the relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in
your system. What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful
impression of the intricacy and artificiality of that system than the
fact that it was necessary to set apart from other pursuits the cream
of the intellect of every generation, in order to provide a body of
pundits able to make it even vaguely intelligible to those whose fates
it determined. The treatises of your great lawyers, the works of
Blackstone and Chitty, of Story and Parsons, stand in our museums,
side by side with the tomes of Duns Scotus and his fellow scholastics,
as curious monuments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects
equally remote from the interests of modern men. Our judges are simply
widely informed, judicious, and discreet men of ripe years.

"I s