 tenure that made it dependent, but is
needless now. No conceivable motive but justice could actuate our judges.«
    »How are these magistrates selected?«
    »They are an honorable exception to the rule which discharges all men from
service at the age of forty-five. The President of the nation appoints the
necessary judges year by year from the class reaching 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law as a special science is obsolete.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. Yon 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
