4 
MENDENHALL. 
jurists and juries are simply questions of fact, and the testi¬ 
mony on which the determination of such questions depends 
often comes from persons who are neither interested nor dis¬ 
honest. In such cases it ought to be easy to reach a true 
conclusion, but there is often failure, growing out of honest 
differences of opinion. 
An eminent attorney not long since referred in conversa¬ 
tion to a certain decision of the Supreme Court of the United 
States concerning which there had been a strong dissenting 
minority. The question was one which involved neither 
passion nor politics, and he declared that to him it seemed 
utterly impossible for a disciplined mind to reach other than 
one conclusion regarding it. 
In any review of this subject such as is here suggested it is 
neither necessary nor proper to refer to the numerous in¬ 
stances of utter failure in our judicial system attributable to 
a lack of integrity on the part of those who administer the 
laws or to the mischievous results of appeals to passion or 
prejudice by unprincipled advocates. It is sufficient to recog¬ 
nize the fact that failure in the administration of law is not 
uncommon where witnesses are honest, juries intelligent and 
well-meaning, and judges incorruptible. 
The rapidly increasing number of controversies within the 
church, to say nothing of those in which the disputants are 
on opposite sides of the wall, show conclusivelv that the 
logic of the theologian must sometimes go at a limping gait. 
In political or social economy there is great diversity of 
opinion among good and able men. Certain financial legis¬ 
lation by Congress is honestly thought by many people to be 
necessary to prevent wide-spread disaster and the financial 
ruin of one of the largest and most important classes of our 
citizens; by other equally intelligent and equally honest 
men such action on the part of the National Legislature is 
condemned as dishonest in principle and sure to be fatal to 
the business interests of the country. 
A large number of able and patriotic men address them¬ 
selves to the solution of the problem of the adjustment of 
