I have thus enlarged upon our institutional law to give young men a hint of its possibilities.  Before this century closes, the greatest law book in all the literature of jurisprudence will be produced upon the subject of our institutional law.  The materials are as plentiful as the history of our race, the demand as insistent as our daily life.

Great law books all written!  Nonsense.  As yet we have had only the turgid descriptions of the toilsome and halting progress of justice through the ages—­that is all we have had, compared with the noble volume that will be written, giving mankind the high, clear, and simple thinking of a greater Blackstone and a wiser Kent.  It may be that this generation will produce this immortal judicial author; it may be that you, young man, are he.  At least one thing is sure—­the work is there waiting for the workman.

But if you do not feel equipped for this monumental effort, there are other phases of the law more imminent, if not so comprehensive, in each of which there is opportunity and demand for original work.

For example, it is clear to all that the laws of marriage and divorce must be made rational and uniform throughout the Nation; that the laws respecting corporations are inappropriate, inadequate, and unjust, both to corporations and to the public—­that they do not measure up to the present complex conditions; that the laws respecting commercial paper need to be systematized.

It is absurd, too, that a farmer living on one side of an imaginary state line which separates his farm and the state in which it is located from that of his neighbor living on the other side of the imaginary line in another state, should have to deal with his neighbor as if he were a foreigner in a foreign land and under foreign laws.

Again, the multiplication of decisions on all subjects has reached a point where practise by precedent, to be exhaustive and thorough, has become practically impossible; and so the problem that confronted the Roman emperors, and terminated in the Pandects of Justinian, is now demanding immediate solution at the hands of American legislators, lawyers, and jurists.

So, you see, my ambitious young friend, that by no means all has been done in the law, and that what has been done is so bulky, unorganized, and confused, that even to reduce, rationalize, and systematize it is the greatest task of all.  The trouble will therefore be with yourself, and not with conditions, if you remain an underling in this great profession.

Take literature—­take imaginative literature.  More can be said on its possibilities than on those of the law—­and I enlarged upon the unexplored fields of the law merely to outline the immensity of the great things yet to be done in the law’s domain.  Is it not plain that the great novel of modern society is yet to be written?  The contest between human nature and the complex machinery of our industrial system, and the mastery of human nature over the latter, present a theme such as Homer, or Vergil, or Dante never had.