the honor which you have conferred upon me. There never was a time in the history of the Association when it was a greater honor to preside over the deliberations of this body than now, and there never was a time when railroad lawyers appreciated favors coming to them as they do now.

You are not prepared to listen to a speech from me and I am not prepared to deliver one to you, but in fairness to my predecessor, I want to say, on behalf of the Association, that we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the excellent papers and program which you have given us at this meeting here in Des Moines, and my only pledge to my brothers and sisters is this: if you will help me, we shall come back to the Bar meeting next year and put on another program that will make this one look modest, indeed.

What is your further pleasure?

JUDGE JESSE A. MILLER: One of the oldest members of the Association, in years, and I think one of the oldest in membership, is not present with us to-day. Some days ago, a number of men in this city sent out invitations to their various friends throughout the State. We knew the Secretary would ask you to attend, but we also wanted to give you our invitation to attend. To a letter addressed to this man, he made the following reply:

Yours of the fifteenth instant received, relating to attendance at the State Bar Association meeting next week. When I passed the ninetieth milestone, I gave up the idea of going from home, but the Epworth Seminary allured me to their Commencement last month, and in two days I lived in a stratum so high above the common that it took me a week to recuperate. I have suggestions I would like to make to the State Bar Association and would be very much interested in attending, but I am so situated that it will be almost an impossibility. I will be there, if I can.

Yours truly,

JAMES O. CROSBY.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I wish, on behalf of the Association, to offer this telegram, to be sent to Mr. Crosby:

We are enjoying a great meeting, but we miss you. We trust that ere you reach your hundredth birthday, we shall have you with us again, not only in spirit but in the flesh.

IOWA STATE BAR ASSOCIATION.

I move you this telegram be sent by the Secretary to Mr. Crosby.

(The motion was duly seconded and unanimously adopted.)

THE PRESIDENT: The final number on the program is an address by an attorney from our sister State, Minnesota, on the north. I have not had the pleasure of an extended acquaintance with Mr. Brown, but I have had luncheon with him. I like him and like what he thinks and I like the way he says it.

I am glad to introduce to you now Mr. Rome G. Brown, of Minneapolis, who will deliver his address on the Disloyalty of Socialism.

MR. BROWN: Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Iowa State Bar Association: I have been advertised as Honorable Rome Brown, and I have been addressed as Judge Brown. I am neither Honorable nor Judge, but a plain hard-working or hardworked lawyer.

Why I should have been put upon your program was a mystery to me. But it is all solved now. President Adams has announced the program of this year to be very modest as compared with the one next year.

THE DISLOYALTY OF SOCIALISM

Your request for this address was that I should repeat the address delivered a year ago before the Louisiana State Bar Association; but the view of Socialism as a menace to our institutions, then presented, has, during the year or more of our war with Germany, proven to be altogether too narrow and too mild. Under the crucial test of the most strenuous war in which this country has ever been engaged, it has been demonstrated that the disloyalty of Socialism is not confined to internal revolution against our Government and its institutions, but that it extends

1"'The Socialist Menace to Constitutional Government,'-annual address before Louisiana State Bar Association, at Alexandria, La., May 12, 1917 -published in the American Bar Association Journal, January, 1918.

to a seditious and treasonable alliance with that horde of maniacs who threaten from without an invasion of our land and threaten to crush our Government and its institutions, and to subject all civilized nations of the earth to the faithless and barbarous domination of the iron hand of the Hohenzollern.

Thus in a double sense Socialism has emerged as an ally of the enemies of our constitutional Government. It has always been an ally of our enemies within, who seek by disruption and internal revolution to destroy our constitutional Democracy by eliminating all constitutional protection, and to subject all individual and property rights to a tyranny, whereby a government by the temporary whim and caprice of the voters shall be substituted for a government by law. It now also becomes an ally of that militarism of the Hun which from without seeks to subject us to the tyranny of a militarist autocracy.

It is these two phases of Socialism of which I speak today.

SOCIALISM IN TIMES OF PEACE

Socialism is an enemy of our Government in times of peace. Its creed and platform denote revolution against our form of government. The Socialists seek to bring about that revolution from within, not only by a change of the attitude of mind of our citizens toward our free institutions and toward the protective features peculiar to our constitutional Democracy, but also, when the critical moment shall arrive and if, as they say, it shall be necessary to accomplish the final disruption of our Government, by an open armed revolt. This language seems strong, but let us examine the facts and characterize the internal menace of Socialism from the lips and writings of its own teachers.

OURS A GOVERNMENT OF INDIVIDUALISM

The social and political theory upon which our Government is based is the very opposite of that of Socialism. Socialism means a direct and pure democracy in government,-a government by mob rule, a subjection of the individual citizen to the whim and caprice of temporary passion, a government without the intervention of courts or of representative, deliberative legislation.

It means an obliteration of property rights and of individual liberties and rights, except as the citizen shall per se become a silent partner in the fruits, if there be any, of enterprises owned and managed by the State. Under Socialism, prosperity depends, not upon individual ambition, effort and thrift, but, rather, upon the displacement of competition and of the exercise of talent and of effort by the individual, by a subjection of individual talent and enterprise to the direct control of the State. Individual prosperity and property rights are to be submerged in State control. Likewise individual talent, incentive, effort and motive for effort and for thrift, and all their fruits,-all are to be submerged in State control. Property rights and personal rights and liberties are to be lost under the paternalistic and tyrannical sovereign power of the socialistic democracy.

Our Constitution was written as a manifestation of the world's greatest revolt, by a united people, against, not only the tyranny of monarchy but also against the tyranny of democracy. For the very reason that Socialism is radically democratic, it is even more susceptible of tyranny to the individual than any tyranny of monarchy.

The Magna Charta, wrested from King John at Runnymede, was the greatest protest of the English-speaking world against the tyrannical invasion of the individual rights and liberties of the citizen. Its real force, however, in English jurisprudence, was never adequately felt, until, in the form of the Bill of Rights, it became a part of our Constitution, wherein the enforcement of the individual rights and liberties therein declared was vouchsafed by express limitations upon the legislative power. Our Constitution declared individual property rights and liberties and at the same time safeguarded their maintenance by the fundamental law which was made controlling upon all law-making power of the States and of the Nation. Freedom from unauthorized search or imprisonment, freedom of religion, and, above all, the right to acquire and hold property, and the right of individual liberty in all social and business relations,— the efficient protection of these individual rights was, more than

anything else, the purpose, and the accomplishment of our Constitutional Government.

Of course, where the right of private property exists there must be inequalities of fortune, varying as the diligence, skill, effort and thrift of the individual varies. The Socialist would level all inequalities of fortune, simply because he deems that such leveling would conduce to the welfare of the now less prosperous. He would accomplish that object by direct confiscation if feasible; otherwise by indirect means. He would ignore, and as soon as possible abolish, all constitutional guaranties by which private property rights are now protected.

In a recent case the United States Supreme Court said:

No doubt, wherever the right of private property exists, there must and will be inequalities of fortune; Since it is self-evident that, unless all things are held in common, some persons must have more property than others, it is from the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights. But the Fourteenth Amendment, in declaring that a State shall not "deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law," gives to each of these an equal sanction; it recognizes "liberty" and "property' as co-existent human rights, and debars the States from any unwarranted interference with either.

And since a State may not strike them down directly it is clear that it may not do so indirectly, as by declaring in effect, that the public good requires the removal of those inequalities that are but the normal and inevitable result of their exercise, and then invoking the police power in order to remove the inequalities, without other object in view. The police power is broad, and not easily defined, but it cannot be given the wide scope that is here asserted for it, without in effect nullifying the constitutional guaranty.2

THE REVOLUTIONARY AIMS OF SOCIALISM

We are not here directly concerned with the purely social, economic, or religious phases of Socialism. So far as this discussion is concerned, the labor-cost theory of value, propounded by Karl Marx as the basis of the socialistic creed, is immaterial. It would be useless here to follow through the fallacious syllo2 Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U. S. 1, 17-18.