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THE GREEN BAG Present conditions, then, are permanent; at least, in the sense that no reversion to earlier conditions is probable. Were the obvious causes, as they appear from the religious, moral, or professional standpoint real and efficient ones, ample reason for alarm would be furnished. The fundamental difficulty, however, lies deeper, and has a remedy. In moral matters the control of evil is not gained by eliminating but by overcoming with higher and therefore more dominant forces. Evil is to be frankly accepted as a certain, inevitable part of the discipline of life. This is no secret. Every wise parent or teacher sees that the child of his love or interest is best prepared for a career of honorable success among moral pitfalls, not by removing him from temptation, but by fortifyinghim with amoral armor against which temptation shatters or from which it is deflected. It is hopeless to expect that the evil incident to the gains of advancing civilization can be eliminated or concealed. All that can be affected are the elements of character to which this evil appeals, that in which it finds its response. The basic evil of commercialism lies in the low ideals for which it stands. Let but the actual ideals of a man be normally high and business methods are powerless to lower the ethical quality of professional achievement. They can but heighten and perfect. May we not reasonably conclude that the man who mourns the absence of religious sanc tions, he who laments the growth of mer cenary motive, and he who desires to revive old customs, while entirely right from their several points of view and though each evil as indicated has its appropriate effect upon the complicated result, are dealing rather with the symptoms than with the causes of the disease, and that no remedy along such lines can be other than palliative? The most careful, painstaking work of bar asso ciations, grievance committees, or other corrective or purgative agencies in remov ing gross offenders is as powerless to prevent professional degeneration as our criminal

codes prove to be in eradicating crime. Something deeper, earlier, more fundamental is needed. It has been foreshadowed. Proper ideals must be created at the start and steadily maintained. In professional relations, the only safe ideal is one so high that it can never fully be realized; so attractive that the struggle to reach it can never be aban doned. Ideals, real ideals, constitute, as it were, the mould into which a developing, plastic character forms itself. Such seems to be the law of all growth in nature, physi cal, mental, moral. Back of the ideal, within its form, grows the actual. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Now it is, unfortunately, not difficult to recognize the ideal in which a fair proportion of the fresh accessions to the bar, including many of those of this and every gradua tion year, place their real hopes of profes sional success, — smartness. By "smartness" the young man reasonably understands keen intellectual appreciation of the possi bilities of an immediate situation coupled with greater or less indifference to details in the selection or manipulation of means for making it serve the ends the person in ques tion has in view. In the far too frequent opinion, it is the primary duty of a lawyer to be "smart." As he stands on the thres hold of his career, at the parting of the ways there is slight matter for wonder that he should think as he does. He has very prob ably been selected and set apart by his parents, to his own knowledge and -with the family approval, for the legal profession for the sole, precise, and to all concerned sufficient, reason that he was believed to be "smart." As he has grown up to youth and young manhood each act of shrewdness, nebulous unveracity, or self-regarding in tellectual acumen, has been hailed, by com mon consent, as the earnest and augury of professional success. At his law school it is more than probable that he found things to be very much the same as at home. The standard of success, as he sees it, is a purelv