I admit their importance, but I am of opinion they can aid us much in the solution of a better County Court system.

Thus we will secure at less cost to the Commonwealth better County Courts, and the administration of justice to all classes of people promptly and efficiently through the clerks of the counties, the district courts, and the district attorneys.

But with regard to this question of the mere cost about which so much ado is made it is well enough to understand that cheapness never is a mark of merit, and the most costly. course is to sacrifice quality for the mere matter of money. A well paid and efficient judiciary constituted of men of character and competency will be the most economical expenditure the Commonwealth can possibly make.

In conclusion, I can but offer apology for the disconnected suggestions which I have presented without pretense on my part of any philosophic arrangement, but from these may come the stimulus to others of you, by candid criticism, but I hope not with ridicule, to take up this task, that when the call for a convention comes we shall be ready to respond with an intelligent and satisfactory answer at least on this subject, for which wo are peculiarly responsible.

In a printed address, "Christianity and the Law," to some Bar Association, that eminent divine of the Presbyterian Church, Rev. B. M. Palmer, D. D., of New Orleans, paid our profession a tribute as deserved as it is memorable, which I remember to have heard him say in substance in a sermon at the University of Virginia years ago. Here it is:

"It is not for me to eulogize your splendid vocation. It is the highest encomium to pronounce that you are indispensable to society. My observation has been that the moral tone of every community is determined by the character of its Bar. In every part of the civilized world it is the leading influence by which society is silently moulded."

Lofty words, my brethren, are these, and appropriate to quote upon this occasion, because we cannot fulfil these exalted du

ties properly except through a satisfactory judicial system. Our greatest Chief Justice's burning words so often quoted, "The greatest scourge an angry heaven ever inflicted upon an ungrateful and a sinning people—an ignorant, a corrupt or a dependent judiciary," become many fold more full of meaning to us if we thus regard our profession in this high and noble light, and surely no Bar on earth can look back upon a past more glorious than the Bar of Virginia.

This century is closing in great contrast to the last years of the eighteenth century. Its shot and shell, its wars, its political upheavals, the shadow of the Corsican Eagle in his splendid career, the aftermath of the dire French Revolution, the birth throes of our own Republic, with their product of such magnificent men, and splendid principles, fall into smallness when we contemplate what now confronts us in this our own beloved land in these last years of the century.

It was De Tocqueville who, having studied our institutions, and praised them as the best product of a wise patriotism, yet predicted that they could not last much beyond a century; that when wealth became concentrated in the hands of a favored few, and the many were made more and more hewers of wood and drawers of water," a stronger arm would be needed, and the liberty loving Union of free and independent sovereign States could not exist, but would become welded into a centralized nation, which by might could compel the submission of its discontented classes to the ever increasing demands of the overwealthy who would lack the lofty ideals of generations of noble birth.

I have ever thought the victory at Appomattox preserved the Union but destroyed the United States. To-day I feel this to be surely true, when we are being driven, whether by that Divinity which with nations, as with men, " shapes our ends," or of our own ambitious avarice, to surrender the cherished principles of peace and home for the bitter fruits of foreign conquest. Moreover, the monopoly of old did not compare in its

menace to liberty, and danger to individual effort with the corporations of this day and generation.

Bulwer says in Kenelm Chillingly: "The greatest happiness of the greatest number is best secured by a prudent consideration of number one." But to-day "Number One," the individual man, is being eliminated from life as a factor. He is a mere peg, a cog in a wheel. Between the nether millstone of anarchy and socialism and the upper millstone of aggrandized wealth the common man is liable to be ground to powder.

Brethren of the Bar of Virginia, we must breast this storm. The brunt of its fury we must bear. Nothing is so much needed to aid us in opposing the socialism and anarchy from beneath, which would abolish all courts, or the accursed avarice and greed of the short-sighted combinations of money-getters from above, which propose to purchase justice, so-called, to suit their own ends, as to secure in Virginia a sound and well balanced judicial system—a judiciary fearless, independent, irreproachable, wise and efficient. A judicial system which will demand justice for the poorest, and ensure justice to the richest; which will be a bulwark to withstand the eruptions of malcontented masses, a shield to shelter the weak and oppressed from the strong and aggressive. That is what we need and what we should and can have.

I trust, then, that my words may become as seeds sown in good ground to bear fruit a hundred fold to our betterment, to the preservation of our liberties, to the security of society, and to the general good of our beloved Commonwealth of Virginia.

PAPER

BY

WILLIAM B. PETTIT,

OF THE FLUVANNA BAR.

THE PROPERTY AND CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS AND POWERS OF MARRIED WOMEN.

SUGGESTIONS OF AMENDMENTS OF THE LAW.

Chapter 103 of the Code of Virginia, 1887, with reference to married women, contains some provisions that have given rise to considerable diversity of opinion; some which are anomalous; and some which are inadequate to completely effect the ends and purposes of the scheme inaugurated by the Act of April 4, 1877, and amplified by the Act of March 14, 1878, and by the provisions of this chapter.

As the rights of property, and of person in a business sense, of the wife, are to be unaffected by her marriage, and to remain the same as if she were unmarried, I can perceive no good reason for circumscribing her contractual powers, or her liabilities and rights in respect to her acts, conduct and transactions, or the remedies to be pursued by or against her on account thereof. Being released from the fetters of the common law in respect to the ownership and control of her property, and in respect to her personal conduct and services, in a business way, with strangers, and her husband being divested of his common law rights and relieved of his common law liabilities in all these regards,