t 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"The law as a special science is obsolete.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 should not fail to speak of one important function of the minor
judges," added Dr. Leete. "This is to adjudicate all cases where a
private of the industrial army makes a complaint of unfairness