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Cornell University Library 
 KF 211.R98 
 
 Addresses bv Hoa Edward G.f^^^^^^^^ 
 
 3 1924 024 346 920 
 
I| Cornell University 
 J Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024346920 
 
ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 Hon. EDWARD G. |YAN, 
 
 Late Chief Justice of Wisconsin, 
 
 Delivered before the Wisconsin Law School, 
 
 1873, 
 
 AND 
 
 Hon.MATT.H.CARPENTER, 
 
 Late United States Senator, 
 
 Delivered before the Columbian Law School, 
 
 1870. 
 
 PUBLISHED TJKDEE THE AUSPICES OP THE LAW CLASS, 
 
 MADISON, WIS. 
 
 M. J. CANTWELL, BOOK AND JOB PRINTER, KING ST. 
 1882. 
 
CJIi' GENERAL demand for these addresses has warranted 
 t/ their republication. The one coining from Wisconsin's 
 ablest jurist, the other from her most .distinguished statesman, 
 make them of peculiar interest to the lawyers of this state. 
 
 Their literary merit has already won for them a place second 
 to none. The lofty sentiment which they contain, with their 
 many practical suggestions, make them especially valuable to 
 the young lawyer. No one can read these addresses without a 
 truer conception of the magnitude of the law, and the abid- 
 ing consciousness that work is the price of success. 
 
ADDRESS OF HON. E. G. RYAN. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Laiv School: 
 
 I obey your invitation to address you, on the occasion of your taking your 
 degree in the University, and assuming your place in the profession to 
 which society intrusts the administration of its laws.. I salute you mem- 
 bers of our ancient and honorable body. I welcome you to no tranquil 
 life, no cultured ease. I welcome you to a calling of incessant labor, high 
 duty and grave responsibility. If our profession be, as I believe, the most 
 honorable, it is also the most arduous, of all secular professions. Duty is 
 the condition of all dignity. 
 
 Law, in- its highest sense, is the will of God. None other has inherent 
 authority. All else are derivatives of that. And the will of God is over 
 all things and sufficient for all things. Nothing is so great as to be above, 
 nothing is so small at to be below, nothing is so fixed as to be beyond. His 
 universal law. Nature endures no outlaw. In all that we know of nature, 
 animate and inanimate, rational and irrational, all things are appointed to 
 fulfill a law of their creation. In every second of time, since time began, 
 all things in nature have been obeying or disobeying their appointed law. 
 There is no respite of the law ; no abeyance of the duty. It is obedience or 
 disobedience, of every creature, in every instant, through all time. From 
 the foundation of the worlds, the senseless matter which composes them, has 
 its ceaseless law, and has obeyed it. The natural forces hidden within the 
 spheres, have been incessantly at work, and the spheres have traveled their 
 endless paths, in obedience to the law given to them at their creation. The 
 graas of the field and the trees of the forest have sprouted and grown and 
 withered and died, and renewed themselves again and again, to grow and 
 wither and die, according to the law appointed for tliem in the beginning. 
 The beasts who tenant the earth witli man, and the fishes who possess the 
 water under the earth, and the birds who hold the air above the earth, every 
 insect and every reptile, have followed the instincts of their being, each 
 after its kind, in obedience to the law of their creation. So will it be, 
 through the ages to come, to the end. These know not the law-giver, but 
 
6 
 
 obey the law. So man too has done and suffered, lived and died, from gene- 
 ration to generation, according to the law of life appointed for him. But as 
 man has a higher nature, so is a higher law given to him. The mere law 
 of animal life and reproduction suffices the brutes, not man. Man alone, in 
 our nature, is rational. Man alone, therrfore, is responsible. To man 
 alone, therefore, has God given a moral law. Matter obeys its law insen- 
 sibly. The brutes obey their law instinctively. Man's obedience to his 
 moral law is voluntary. Man alone knows God, and man alone disobeys 
 his law. Matter and brutes are the slaves of nature, and therefore irre- 
 sponsible. Man is the subject of nature, and therefore responsible to its 
 law. For man was created with reason and will. And a law was given to 
 him for the guidance of his reason and the government of his will. He, 
 therefore, has the option of obedience or disobedience, at his peril. He 
 was created a free agent, subject to the law, responsible for his freedom. 
 Like all things else in our nature, he too has his duty ; but unlike theirs, 
 his duty rests in his will. In him only is obedience reluctant or disobedi- 
 ence alluring. This is an essential of his nature; perhaps an essential of 
 the moral law given to him. It is the condition of his reason ; the price of 
 his dignity ; the penalty of his freedom. True freedom rests upon intelli- 
 gence. So liberty alone is responsible, and it is essentially responsibte. 
 Liberty, not responsible, would be vicious license, and there is none such in 
 nature. Freedom and accountability are correlative. This is the law of 
 God, in all His works, from the beginning. Man is free, because he is 
 rational ; and responsible, because he is free. Voluntary obedience to law 
 is his whole duty on earth. 
 
 The brutes have a single nature, purely sensual. But the nature of man 
 is essentially dual ; the animal nature of the body, and the rea-sonable 
 nature of the soul. For reason is the attribute and manifestation of the 
 human ^oul. Purely animal life is essentially irrational. A higher and 
 truer philosophy, a philosophy graver and more reverential, less flippant 
 and superficial, than is now common amongst us, teaches us that our reason 
 is not an incident of our animal life, but the quality of a life within us, 
 distinct from the life of the body. One pliilosophy teaches us that we are 
 mere bodies, without soul ; another that we are mere souls, without body. 
 Common sense, the sense of all nations, in all time, the universal and uner- 
 ring instinct of nature, teach us that we have both body and soul. We 
 credit our senses for our body, and we credit our reason for our soul. Phi- 
 losophy may sometimes bewilder our pride of intellect, and sense bewitch 
 our perception of truth ; but it is the lesson of all patient and faithful self- 
 observation, that we have a double life, sensual and intolloctnal; a mortal 
 body and an immortal soul. This pre-supposes creation and Creator ; and 
 rescues us from the monstrous superstition, that senseless dust has the power 
 of self-organization into animal life, and animal life the power of self-evolu- 
 
tion into rational man. There are passages in all our lives, perhaps, when 
 we are wholly given up to one or other member of our double nature ; and, 
 for the time, are wholly spiritual or wholly sensual. But such are excep- 
 tional; and we are commonly conscious, the higher our culture and the 
 purer our lives — the more we are conscious, of the dual life within us ; of 
 our composite nature, in which the animal and intellectual are opposing 
 forces within ns, for the mastery of our lives. And this is not two separate 
 natures, but one combining nature ; so perfectly combined, that it is not 
 always possible to distinguish the influences of sense and of spirit. Indeed, 
 each affects the other largely. The soul has a tendency to refine and sub- 
 lime the animal instincts, the sensual passions, with somewhat of its own 
 spiritual tone. And the animal nature has power to imbrute the soul, and 
 dim its intelligence, and blunt its sensibilities, with the glamour of sense. 
 The condition of this dual nature, the influence of intellect upon passion 
 and passion upon intellect, of will upon conscience and conscience upon 
 will, of spirit upon flesh and flesh upon spirit, are active in every hour of 
 our lives; and yet constitute an inscrutable mystery within us, which phi- 
 losophy cannot penetrate nor metaphysics define. And so, with knowledge 
 of good and evil, with choice of good and evil, the dual nature of man has 
 an innate propensity for both ; a conflicting disposition ; an organization 
 discordant within itself ; and is apt to confound good and evil, not only in 
 his outer life, but even in his inner consciousness. So human life is often 
 an inconsistency, and human character always a mystery. Free will is 
 never constant ; it habitually vacillates between right and wrong. And the 
 whole race may often cry out, with the sensual Eoman, 
 
 Video meliora proboque, 
 Deteriora sequor. 
 
 And thus it is that man only, in our nature, disobeys the law of his 
 being ; that his obedience is never perfect, always uncertain, often re- 
 luctant. 
 
 Matter is perfect in nature, subject to its own inevitable law of change. 
 Vegetation is perfect in nature, subject to its own law of seed time and har- 
 vest. Brutes are perfect in nature, subject to their own law of life and re- 
 production. Man may indeed evoke latent forces of matter, devolop vege- 
 tation, educate and modify brutes. But these are their involuntary 
 changes, appertaining to the progress of man. Of themselves, they are 
 complete by natue. Man only is an incomplete creation. Man only is im- 
 perfect in nature. He only has power of voluntary change. This is inci- 
 dent to his reason and will. This is essential to his dual life. He may, by 
 disobedience, fall to the lowest condition of his animal nature. He may,^by 
 obedience, rise to the highest dignity of his spiritual nature. Of his own 
 free choice, he may scale the heaven of good, or sink into the hell of evil. 
 
He has vast undeveloped faculties. He has capacities of knowledge and 
 power, far beyond his indigenons state. These he may develope, or forego 
 to sensual sloth. These he may develop, for good or for evil. He is born for 
 self-culture. That is an essential duty of his nature and his liberty. And 
 not the individual man only ; mankind from generation to generation, ha? 
 the capacity of progress, through all time. For to man only, in our nature, 
 are given ancestral memory, inherited experience, and history. A great 
 deal is said of human progress. Men boast of progressive civilization, as if 
 it came of some creative force of man. True progress rests absolutely in 
 taan's obedience to the law appointed for him. True civilization is submis- 
 sion to the will of God. It is God's reward for the obedience of man. In 
 the exercise of man's free will, choosing between obedience and disobedi- 
 ence of the law of his being, it is the will of God that his condition be- 
 tween the extremes of his dual nature, between the brute instincts of the 
 body and the spiritual aspirations of the soul, should be the wages of his 
 life ; his own voluntary self-accomplishment. His duty, his dignity and 
 his happiness rest alike on his observance of the law appointed for him. 
 Obedience to law is the sole condition of human good. 
 
 Thus constituted, man was not created in society, but he was created for 
 society. He is here for self-discipline, self-culture ; for the progressive ac- 
 complishment of what is called civilization, by observance of the law 
 of his being. This, he cannot do alone. This he can do only in society. 
 Outside of society, there is little self-culture to be achieved by individuals ; 
 there is no civilization to be achieved by the race. Man, therefore, was 
 made essentially gregarious and social. In entering into society, man 
 obeyed the law of his being, and made his first step • in civilization. And 
 society is not the creature of his will. It is the order of nature. The fig- 
 ment of social contract ; the cant that society came from the intelli- 
 gence of man, and rests in his will ; are frightful heresy against nature. 
 The mere will of man was iuadequate to found it, is incompetent to dissolve 
 it. It rests in the law of his being. Man indeed organized society, but 
 God ordained it. God made it essential to humanity. God himself instituted 
 the family, and the family is the germ of all society. It is the initial form of 
 society. As man multiplied, kindred families combined and founded septs 
 or clans. As septs multipled, tliey combined in turn and founded nations. 
 Families are aegregate society. Communities are aggregate society. The 
 .state is the outgrowth of the family. The state rests in the neces-sities of 
 nature. Its authority rests on the law of God. 
 
 There is no incompleteness or insufficiency, no casus omissus, in the Divine 
 law. It needs no revision, no office of construction. From the beginning, 
 it is always the same, with no variableness neither shadow of turning. It 
 is adequate to all conditions, all changes. It is all sufficient for the govern- 
 ment of human society. The problems of society and its troubles, spring, not 
 
from insufficiency of tlie law, but from disregard of tiie law. The law is ade- 
 quate to all the exigencies of society, all its chances and changes ; but obedi- 
 ence to the law is essential to the order of society. 
 
 It is not necessary to discuss here the philosophy of man's disobedi- 
 ence or God's sufferance of it ; nor to consider the terrible problem of man's 
 reaping to himself, generation after generation, such harvests of suffering 
 and sorrow and shame, from the same seed of disobedience of the law ajf- 
 pointed for his welfare. It is an awful mystery, the apparent conflict be- 
 tween the providence of God, and the free will which He has given to man. 
 We know that free man sets the divine law at naught, and substitutes his 
 own devices for the order of God. But we know that the eternal will ac- 
 complishes its own ends, in its own way, in its own time. We read God's 
 law visibly written in the history of the world. And we stand in reveren- 
 tial awe before the dread mystery, that, while God suffers man to apostatize 
 from nature, and to rebel against law. His providence evolves its own inevit- 
 able order, according to His own inscrutable plan, in the career of the re- 
 bellious race. Events may be accidental, but history is no blind chance. 
 There is a law to govern it. It registers the blunders and failures of man, 
 his follies and his crimes ; but it also bears witness to the overruling pro- 
 vidence of God, directing its course and controlling its destinies, from age 
 to age. Civilization is the work of man ; but it his work according to the 
 law, and under the guidence, of God. 
 
 From the foundation of human society, its welfare has always waited on 
 the law appointed for it. But, in society, as in nature, man is free to obey 
 or disobey the law of his being. And society itself, but the aggregate of 
 men, is infected with the individual proneness to overlook the law given to 
 it. Indeed society, developing new relations, restraints and duties, new 
 wants, temptations and vices, has a tendency to aggravate the common 
 propensity to disobey. And thu.s, while the end of man's life cannot be 
 attained out of society, the social condition renders the personal submission 
 of man a greater strain upon his will ; and tends to make less certain and 
 more imperfect his observance of the law, on which the end of of his being 
 depends. The sins of man, in society, are not merely personal, they are 
 social; and tend, not only to his own injury, but to the disorder of society. 
 The law is sufficient, but the observance of the law is necessary to society- 
 Man's natural election uetween obedience and disobedience of the law, essen- 
 tial to his personal freedom, is incompatible with the welfare of society. 
 The free will of men would make society anarchy ; the anarchy of fraud and 
 wrong ; in the words of the Vulgate, describing hell, ubi nullus ]ordo, sed 
 iempitenms horror inhabitat. The law alone will not suffice. There must be 
 power to enforce obedience of the law. It is the providence of God to suf- 
 fer man to work out his own good or evil, of his own voluntary action. God 
 gave the law, but does not administer the law. He never directly compels 
 
10 
 
 obodien.ie, and rarely directly punishes disobedience. His rule is general, 
 not particular. History discloses some conception of His rule in the past ; 
 but His present rule is hidden in the inscrutable darkness which veils His 
 presence from the eyes of sense He leaves to man the direct control of 
 human will. He leaves society to find its own disorder. So society needs 
 more than the law; it needs administration of the law. The law alone will 
 aafiSce. Society needs government under the law. God leaves society to 
 self-government. He therefore delegates to society authority, in its own be- 
 half, to enforce obedience to His law, and to punish disobedience. This is 
 the subrogated power of society. This is the authority of the state ; the 
 source and scope of all its pow^r, legislative, executive and judicial. 
 
 We speak, fluently enough, of the law of nature, but we do not always 
 comprehend it ; never fully. Finite reason is incompetent to the full ap- 
 preciation of infinite intelligence. And sense often dazzles reason, or blinds 
 it to the perception of divine truth. It is the duty of man, in all time, to 
 strive humbly and earnestly for knowledge of God's law. But human 
 study of divine frisdom ia always fitful, often vain and sometimes arrogant. 
 Man is prone to the presumption of looking inward for the comprehension 
 of God and of his law. Many a pompous philsopher, who questions divine 
 law, or assumes to measure divine economy with a foot-rule, is only a 
 sorttif theological Narcissus, worshipping his own reflection and beholding 
 the infinite wisdow of the Creator in the foolish conceit of the creature. 
 Without the light of revelation, man, at his best, gropes painfully in the 
 dark, and sees dim and shadowy visions of the divine order ; phantoms of 
 truth, rather than truth itself. With all the light of revelation, man has so 
 far acquired but indistinct glimpses of divine truth. It is weak bias, 
 phemy to prate that man has outgrown revelation. He has not risen to its 
 comprehension, his civilization does not qualify him to appreciate it. And 
 so our knowledge of divide law is still elementary. The duty to study it 
 remains with us all, always. We are here in this world-school, in our 
 pupilage of time, to learn its lessons. But, from generation to generation, 
 we discern its letter, we appreciate its spirit, with slow and blundering and 
 laborious progress. And as our study of God's moral law reveals to us 
 principles rather than provisions ; and as the governing law of society must 
 depend on particular provisions for all social exigencies ; it has become a 
 necessity of society, from time to time, to formulate its comprehension of 
 divine law. This is the foundation of all civil law. 
 
 In the primitive form of society, the patriarchal, man probably under- 
 took to administer the law of God, without human formula. The father of 
 the family, the chief of the sept, gave and enforced the law, as he compre- 
 hended it. And it was in his conscience to judge, in his will to execute 
 justice. And as clans combined into nations, this was perhaps the earliest 
 form of national government j the father ruling his family, the chief his 
 
11 
 
 clan, tho central chief or monarch, the nation ; each according to his own 
 conscience, under the divine law. This was pure despotism, because all the 
 authority of society was vested in a single will ; and it was left to a single 
 conscience to announce the law of God, a right equivalent to our sovereign 
 power of legislation, to adjudge its duties and restraints, and to execute the 
 judgment so rendered. The vice of this system lay in the liability of the 
 single conscience to err, in the proneness of the single will to oppress. For 
 power inclines, not only to abuse, but to self-deceit. The radical evil of 
 despotism is not in the form of government, but in its liability to abuse. A 
 paternal and intelligent despotism, where the chief is indeed the Vice- 
 gerent of God, and governs by divine law, in its own just and beneficent 
 spirit, might be practicable in small communities ; and would be perhaps 
 the best form of human society. But these conditions are hopeless in the 
 present state of society ; they belong to the millenium. Pure despotism is 
 essentially a primitive form of government. Mankind outgrew it, 'not only 
 by advancing civilization, but by increasing numbers. For it is not only 
 offensive to the pride of intelligent man; it is impossible in communities too 
 large for the government of a single will. So, as mankind grew in num- 
 bers and intelligence, governments arose with distributed powers. Man 
 gradually acquired the faculty, and saw the value of organization. In time, 
 nations learned to distinguish the three fundamental functions of govern- 
 ment, the executive, legislative and judicial ; and knew that the separation 
 of these is essential to the freedom of society and its order. And it came 
 to be understood that the freedom and order of society depended hardlyjless 
 on observance of the law, than on certainty of the law. And so, when men 
 differed, according to their intelligence and their interest, in the interpreta- 
 tion and application of the law of God, the legislative function set itself at 
 work to formulate the divine law appointed for man, in codes constituting, 
 in each state, the law of the land. Thus the lex loci is the enactment, by 
 each state, for itself, as applicable to the conditions of its own society, of its 
 comprehension of the law given by God to man, in the beginning. This is 
 the philosophy of legislation. This is the authority of municipal law. It 
 does not rest on its own right, but on the right which it reflects. It has the 
 same relation to divine law that moonlight has to sunlight. In a philoso- 
 phical sense, it is not so much the law, as the interpretation of the law. Its 
 moral force rests on the law of God. 
 
 As man has labored and failed and erred in his comprehension of divine 
 law, so has he therefore labored and blundered and miscarried his legisla- 
 tion. Perhaps in no other aspect of life has he more plainly manifested his 
 slow and uncertain progress in civilization, or proved his own insufficiency 
 for himself, his dependence on wisdom and power higher than his own. The 
 history of human legislation is a record of error and presumption. From 
 time to time, man has established code upon code, as the perfection of human 
 
reason ; from time to time, he has had to modify and change each ; from 
 time to time, code upon code has been lost in the revoli'tion or anarchy 
 which snrely awaits all systems of legislation not founded on the divine 
 law. The very nations who devised them have often disappeared, as in the 
 course of time, all things lapse out of being which are not founded by God 
 or do not rest on the law which He gave for the guidance of man. Man's 
 intelligence and cor science both enter into his legislation. Imperfect 
 knowledge of the divine law is the essential error of all municipal law ; in- 
 fidelity to the divine order is its accidental infirmity. These both deform 
 all human codes; it would be hard to say, which of them the most. There 
 has been, at all times, in all nations, more or less judicial blindness to the 
 mandates of God ; more or less abnormal assertion of the will of man, as the 
 rule of society. There has been, at all times, in all nations, an inclination, 
 more or leas presumptious, to intrude human shifts and inventions, essen- 
 tially unnatural and immoral, into the order of God. There have always 
 been the lust of will and the tyranny of accident. At his best, man ha.s 
 never risen wholly out of his brute nature ; and brute nature is essentially 
 selfish. Intelligence has imposed upon ignorance, and ignorance has 
 trampled on intelligence ; wealth has oppressed poverty, and poverty has 
 plundered wealth ; power has domineered over numbers, and majorities 
 have persecuted minorities. All the? natural passions, all the social im- 
 pulses, all the exigencies of life, all the infirmities of humanity, have helped 
 to pervert and distort legislation. At his best, man's intelligence has been 
 inadequate to the government of society. His in.sufficiency is written, 
 through all history, in letters of blood and sorrow and shame ; in terrible 
 episodes of war, and of tyrany, and of social sufferii.g, which perhaps rivals 
 war and tyranny in horror. And man is not only incompetent in legisla- 
 tion ; he is fickle also, as incompetency is apt to be. Through all his boasts, 
 there lurks in him a consciousness of failure. This makes him restles.s. 
 Dissatisfied with the present order, he is more inclined to look to arbitrary 
 change, than to seek the principle of wrong in existing law. He often con- 
 founds change with progress. He forgets that, if antiquity cannot confirm 
 the old, novelty can lend no sanction to the new. He does not perceive that 
 the old ii neither right nor wrong, because it is old ; or the new, because it 
 is new. He forgets jnorality is expediency. lie foregoes principle for ap- 
 pearance. He loses sight of the substance in the darkness of the shadow. 
 He overlooks the law of Gorl, or sees it dimly through the mist of social 
 error. Like all bhnider.-i, legislalion is at once presumptuous xind unstable. 
 It is constantly facing problems wliicli it oainiot solve. It has constantly to 
 correct mistake^, which it did not foresee. Yet it hesitates little at innova- 
 tion, and loves arbitrary change. It has been so far little better than a sys- 
 tem of experiments, more or less successful, as they have adhered, with 
 greater or less fidelity, to the fundamental authority of God's law. 
 
13 
 
 Not the will of man only, but the habits and usages of society, enter into 
 legislation. These habits not only influence written law ; they produce, 
 from generation to generation, those social rules, those common principles, 
 those hereditary precepts, that traditional legislation, which become obliga- 
 tory by prescription, and, with us, are called the common law. There are 
 the customary legislation of experience and progress. And, because com- 
 munities are generally better able to recognize their own wants and conve- 
 nience than individuals to prescribe them ; and, because generations of 
 mankind are generally able to adjust law to society, with nicer fitness, than 
 specnlat'iue precept can frame it; and, because the philosophy of experience 
 is apt to be wiser than the philosophy of theory ; and, because the lex non 
 scriptu, defined, but not literal, is more pliant to new conditions and varying 
 circumstances, than the letter of the lex aervptu, ; the unwritten law, the ju» 
 commune, is perhaps the safest and wisest form of legislation. The wisdom 
 of ages should outweigh personal dogma. With us, far more than on writ- 
 ten constitutions, far more than on the fickle and fragmentary policy of 
 state or national legislation, personal right, the order and welfare of society, 
 rest on the common law. It has no peculiar in-spiration. It is only th© 
 wisdom of generations of our fathers, interpreting the eternal law of right 
 and wrong. It is human, and therefore not perfect. But it has guided the 
 country from which our system of law comes, through many centuries of 
 personal freedom and social order ; it guided the fathers of this country in 
 the establishment of civilization and social order here, and has guided their 
 posterity into great and proapei ous and orderly communities. To-day we 
 owe much of what we have an^ what we are, to the common law order, 
 which our fathers planted in the wilderness of forest and prairie, which are 
 now the United States. It must need amendment, because it is human. It 
 must need modification, because society and its habits and necessities have 
 changed and are changing. But it is perhaps the noble.st contribution — it 
 and the twin system of the civil law together, are assuredly the noblest con- 
 tributions — of human legislation to history; the most faithful human, 
 copies of the divine law. The common law should always challenge ail 
 our respect. It merits the reverence, if it needs the correction, of legisla- 
 tion. Cautious regard and deliberate care should go to all amendment of it. 
 Pert and flippant innovation should not be suffered to lay unskilled and 
 unscrupulous hands upon it. Sweeping changes of it, arbitrary substitutes 
 for it, are always in danger of progressing backward, not forward. This 
 state is suffering to-day from a notable instance of unwise and unhallowed 
 tampering with the common law. The system of pleading and proceeding 
 in the courts of the common law, which had grown up with generations of 
 lawyers and survived them, matured by the experience of ages, rested in the 
 surest principles of logic and of law. It was in some things over technical. 
 It had excrescences and absurdities ; faults which sometimes embarrassed or 
 
14 
 
 impeded justice. But these were frailties, not essential to the system, which 
 might be easily weeded from it. Elsewhere they have been ; leaving the 
 hereditary wisdom, the adjudicated certainty, of the system, redeemed from 
 its defects. But, in several states as in this, it has been arbitrarily abol- 
 ished, sacrificing the essential wisdom of the system for its accidental faults. 
 And, nnder pretence of simplifying the administration of law and facilitat- 
 ing justice, there has been substituted for it, a crude and mischievous 
 theory; which, attempting to dispense with skill, dispenses with certainty 
 and security ; embarrasses the processes of the law ; unsettles much, far 
 beyond its purpose, which was well settled before ; has vastly increased liti- 
 gation and its cost; has impeded justice, and added to the uncertainty of 
 the law. If it survive, it will need exposition for generations of judges, 
 before its innovations, in all their scope and effect, will be settled ; and then 
 it will be more or less of an evil, as the courts shall have given it more or 
 less of lilceness to the system which it displaced. Its simplicity is a cheat. 
 It is loose, not simple. Its plainness is a fraud. It is vague, not plain. It 
 makes the remedies, of the law a paradise of doubt and ambiguity. It was 
 not so intended. It was undoubtedly designed for reform. It is one of 
 countless proofs, that sudden and violent changes of the law are always 
 dangerous and generally wrong ; that reforms of municipal law have no 
 assurance of being right, save only when they follow, through the wilder- 
 ness of error, the guiding light of the law of God. 
 
 This mutability, this appetite for change, are inherent in all human law, 
 because of its essential imperfection. The divine principles of truth and 
 right and justice, are immutable and eternal. It is the duty and necessity 
 of all human legislation, to struggle to conform itself to them. No human 
 system can otherwise be stable. Man may deny God and repudiate His 
 law. But he is under the law, and nothing short of it will fulfill the neces- 
 sities of his life, or satisfy the cravings of his nature. At fault in his com- 
 prehension of divine law, failing in his application of divine law to society, 
 his needs and longings impel him to continual experiment and change. 
 This is the philosophy of uncertainty in human law. It can have no rest 
 from its labors, until at last man shall perfectly comprehend the law which 
 God appointed for him, and shall truly apply it to the conditions of com- 
 plete civilization. And these are the conditions of the millenium, if the 
 future be indeed pregnant with so blessed a state on earth. 
 
 The incompleteness of human law implies its mutability ; and both imply 
 its complexity and confusion. At its best, its varying provisions 
 are defective, fragmentary, partial, inharmonious; often inadequate and 
 even conflicting ; sometimes obscure and doubtful ; rarely as comprehensive 
 and certain as the varying needs and questions of society. Municipal law, 
 resting in the invention of man and the expedients of society, is essenti- 
 ally a failure. 
 
15 
 
 This is judging municipal law by the standard of perfect excellence ; the 
 fallible law of man by the infallible law of God. Our municipal law is 
 only a relative, not a positive, failure. To say that it is a failure, is'only to 
 say that, so far, all society is a failure ; that whatever progress it has made, 
 it has far more to make ; that it is incomplete, and has before it ages of 
 weary experience and toil, before man shall fully comprehend the law of 
 his being, and walk — as Enoch did — with God. That is comparing the 
 present with the future. But when we compare the present with the past 
 then we see the vast progress man has has made in self culture, the wonder- 
 ful amelioration of social law and order. And, while we see how far we are 
 from the end of perfect rest, which means the end of administration of per- 
 fect law, we still comfort ourselves by comparison with those who have gone 
 before us ; and bless the age in which our lives are cast, and the law which 
 secures to us the daily bread of life and the peaceful homes in which we eat it 
 Then we almost wonder that our munciple law has so much likeness in it 
 of the perfect law of God, and are thankful to Him for the government of 
 law, such as it is, under which we live. 
 
 With all its short-comings, it is our only earthly security for personal right 
 and social order. Society scolds, but relies on it. Society sometimes fails 
 to see that the inadequacy and mutability of its law, is essential to its own 
 incompleteness ; and that the complexity and confusion of its law are essen- 
 tial to its own varying habits and restless inventions. Man's unquiet love of 
 change, his search for higher law, grows with his civilization. With these 
 grow the frequent changes of thelaw, and the difficulties of its interpretation 
 and application. And so it happens that, in the most civilized nations, the 
 provisions of the municipal law are the most intricate, abstruse and obscure 
 to the common intelligence ; and the uneducated mind is as much bewilder- 
 ed by the law of the land, as by the law of nature ; and the common and 
 etatute law is a sealed book to most men. Law becomes a science, and the 
 great body of society has no leisure for its study. 
 
 And yet upon the thorough and exact knowledge of the municipal law, 
 upon its intelligent and certain administration, depends the whole value of 
 personal right and social order. This is not always fully felt. There is 
 occasional impatience with the administration of the law and discontent 
 with its results ; and men strive to think that society might dispense with 
 some or all of its machinery. That is a radical delusion, which would re- 
 duce society to anarachy. The direct nnd visible results of the adminis- 
 tration of the law are a small part of its service to society. The number of 
 captured criminals is not the measure of utility of municipal police. It is 
 not the aggregate of invaders whom the sentinel shoots, that tells the value 
 of his guard before the citadel of society. Without administration of the 
 law, there would be virtually no law. The order of society rests on the 
 adminiBtration of the law ; and the freer the society, the more it so rests. 
 
16 
 
 There are governments of force and government of law. A government of 
 law makes a country free; and without full and free administration of the 
 law, it would necessarily lapse into a government of force. In free countries 
 the administration of the law is the law. 
 
 The administration of the law implies the judicial function. For that 
 only is a government of law, which, to apply the language of Mr. Webster, 
 puts life, liberty and property under judicial protection proceeds always 
 upon inquiry ; hears alway.s before determination ; renders judgment only 
 after tri&l. Independent of the judicial function, the legislative is impo- 
 tent, and the executive is despotic. The judicial function implies question 
 and debate. And, in this sense, it includes a Bar, trained and skilled in the 
 principles and processes of the law. This is the bu.siness of lifetime, for 
 ^vhich society at large has no leisure. And so, society has instituted and 
 set apart a body of men, trained to the knowledge and practice of the law, 
 learned in its principles and processes, to interpret the law to society, to 
 guide the business of society under the law, to protect the legal rights of 
 society and its members, to look to the intelligent and faithful course of 
 judicial proceedings, and to stand charged with the holy office of the adminis- 
 tration of God's justice among men. 
 
 Young gentlemen, this is the profession which you have chosen, to the dis- 
 charge of whose active duties you are this day called. This address has 
 been in vain, if it have not verified the high, ardrous and responsible nature 
 of the duties which you are assuming ; if it have not made manifest our 
 profession as the noblest and loftiest of purely human callings. 
 
 There it stands, the profession of the law, sometimes disgraced by error 
 and sin, which are the common lot of all humanity. There it stands, the 
 profession of the law ; not always or fully appreciated by the world. Society 
 is prone to grumble at those who serve it, and to lavish its smiles on those 
 who amuse it. Thei-r it stands, the profession of the law ; subrogated on 
 eatth, for the angels who administrate God's law in heaven. There it stands, 
 charged with the peaceful protection of every public right of the state, of 
 every civil and religious right of the people of the state ; charged with the 
 security and order of society. In peace, the life, liberty and property of 
 the country, its personal freedom and its political symmetry, are in its 
 ultimate keeping. And peace is the normal condition of society, and its 
 duty. Inter anna silent leges, is a fact, not a principle. That is only because 
 all liberty and all right give way before brute force. The authority of the 
 law and the power of its profession are silent only in the downfall of a gov- 
 ernment of law, before the eruption of a government of force. I had the 
 honor to say in the Supreme Court, during the days of terror in the late 
 war, I say now, that no country is free, where the bar is not stronger than 
 the army. The one is the organization of animal power ; the other, of social 
 law and order. The one represents the brutal part, the other the intellectual 
 
17 
 
 part, of man's dual nature. Ckdamt arma togw. Let U9 thank God for re- 
 stored peace, and pray for the perpetual subordination of military power to 
 civil authority ; of the sword to the law ; of those who strilie with the sword, 
 to those who should give law to war as well as to peace, because they re- 
 present on earth eternal right and justice. 
 
 The law is a science. It is no mere trade. It is not the road to wealth. 
 There is, in our society, no branch of business, no mechanic art, which is 
 not a better avenue to riches. Lawyers, indeed, sometimes grow rich in the 
 speculations of the world. Such run the risk of sacrificing their profession 
 to their interest. For law is a jealous mistress, and exacts devotion of heart 
 and life. She often honors her disciple ; but, in this country, she rarely en- 
 riches him. (xreat lawyers, not otherwise enriched, always or almost al- 
 ways, die poor. Wealth too is a jealous god, and those who worship at its 
 shrine must surrender heart and life to their idol. What we call the learned 
 professions are, therefore, not among the thoroughfares of fortune. It is 
 generally the successful lawyer's lot to spend life in the luxury of refined 
 and elegant poverty. The lawyer, indeed, must live and receive his pwid- 
 dam honorarrium. But this is the incident, not the aim, of professional life 
 The pursuit of the legal profession, for the mere wages of life, is a mistake 
 alike of the means and of the end. It is a total failure of appreciation of 
 the character of the profession. 
 
 This is the true ambition of a lawer. To obey God in the service of society ; 
 to fulfill His law in the order of society ; to promote His order in the sub- 
 ordination of society to its own law, adopted under His authority; to min- 
 ister to His justice, by the nearest approach to it, under the municipal law, 
 which human intelligence and conscience c^n accomplish. To serve man, 
 by diligent study and true counsel of the municipal law ; to aid in solving 
 the questions and guiding the business of society, according to the law ; to 
 fulfill his allotted part in protecting society and its members against wrong, 
 in enforcing all rights and redressing all wrongs ; and to answer, before 
 God and man, according to the scope of his ofiice and duty for the true and 
 just administration of the municipal law. 
 
 There go to this ambition, high integrity of character and life ; inherent 
 love of truth and right ; intense sense of obedience, of subordination to- law, 
 because it is law ; deep reverence of all authority, human and divine ; gen- 
 erous sympathy with man, and profound dependence on God. These we can 
 all cominand. There should go high intelligence. That we cannot com- 
 mand. But every reasonable degree of intelligence can conquer adequate 
 knowledge, for meritorious service in the profession. The character of a 
 lawyer cannot always gain distinction. That may belong to intellect. But 
 character can always command usefulness. It is best that they go together. 
 But in our profession, character without high intellect is a greater power 
 for good, than intellect without high character. It is a grievous mistake 
 
18 
 
 that it is a profession of the craft. Craft is tlie vice, not the spirit of the 
 profession. Trick is professional prostitution. Falsehood is professional 
 apostasy. The strength of a lawyer is in thorough knowledge of legal 
 truth, in thorough devotion to legal right. Truth and integrity can do more 
 in the profession, than the subtlest and wiliest devices. The power of in- 
 tegrity is the rule ; the power of fraud is the exception. Enaulation and 
 zeal lead lawyers astry ; but the general law of the profession is duty, not 
 success. In it, as elsewhere in human life, the judgment of success is but 
 the verdict of little minds. Professional duty, faithfully and well per- 
 formed, is the lawyer's glory. This is equally true of the Bench and of the 
 Bar. 
 
 On the bench, lawyers are charged with a higher grade of function, little 
 more important than their duty at the bar. The bench necessarily depends 
 much upon the bar. A good bar is au essential of a good court. The prob- 
 lems of justice can rarely be safely solved in solitary study. Forensic con- 
 flicts give security to the judgmeut of the law. The world sometimes scolds 
 at the delay and uncertainty of the administration of justice. These are 
 evils essential to our civilization, perhaps to any attainable civilization. 
 But summary judgment is judicial despotism. Impulsive judgment is 
 judicial injustice. The bench symbolizes on earth the throne of divine jus- 
 tice. The judge sitting in judgment on it, is the representative of divine 
 justice, but has the most direct subrogation on earth of any attribute of God. 
 In other places in life, the light of intelligence, purit3- of truth, love of 
 right, firmness of integrity, singleness ol purpose, candor of judgment, are 
 relatively essential to high beauty of character. On' the bench they are the 
 absolute condition of duty ; the condition which only can redeem judges 
 from moral leprosy. When I was younger, I could declaim against the 
 enormity of judicial corruption. I could not now. I have no heart for it. 
 The mere words seem to have a deeper ignominy, than the wisest brain and 
 the most fluent tongue could put into other language. The judge who pal- 
 ters with justice, who is swayed by fear, favor, aiFection, or the hope of 
 reward, by personal influence or public opinion, prostitutes the attribute of 
 God, and sells the favor of his maker as atrociously and blasphemously as 
 Jndas did. But the light of God's eternal truth and justice shines on the 
 head of the just judge, and makes it visibly glorious. 
 
 Hardly less grave are the duties of the bar. The courts do not see half 
 the service which a practicing lawyer renders to society. In his oflSce, 
 every lawyer is a judge. In matters not litigated, vastly exceeding litigated 
 matters, he decides all questions ; and, failing litigation, his opinions are 
 the actual judgment of the law. He counsels those who resort to him so 
 as to avoid difficulty, solves doubts, removes obstacles, guides affairs accord- 
 ing to law, and settles controversies before they grow into lawsuits. It is 
 the office of a lawyer at the bar to discourage, not encourage, litigation. 
 
19 
 
 His calm and skilled judgment soothes, if it cannot convince, -contentious 
 selfishness and passion. Every good lawyer's office is a court of concilia- 
 tion. 
 
 It is the business of a lawyer to consider well the merits of a controversy, 
 before he takes retainer to litigate it. But once he is retained, hesitation 
 should give place to zeal. In forensic controversies, one of the parties is 
 generally wrong ; both may be. But that does not imply that the lawyer's 
 retainer does wrong to the administration of ju=tioe. In doubtful cases, it 
 is within neither the duty nor the power of a practicing lawyer to decide. 
 That is for the court. It is only judgment, after litigation, which can settle 
 right. In the selfish controversies of life, a practicing lawyer should gene- 
 rally accept all knowledge as uncertain, as aspects of truth as hypothetical, 
 all opinion as doubtful, until tested by the ordeal of litigation. Even proxi- 
 mate justice ia only to be secured, in the forensic contests of interest and 
 feeling, by thorough presentation of both sides ; by zealous advocacy of 
 each as if it were the sure right. The counsel on both sides, within due 
 professional limits, alike serve the cause of truth, alike contribute to the 
 justice of the case. To this end, it is the duty, of every retained lawyer to 
 put his faith in his client and his client's cause. The lawyer should believe 
 in his retainer when he takes it ; once taken, he should never mistrust nor 
 betray it. The fidelity of our profession is a great moral lesson. Kings 
 may envy and prelates imitate it. It is a shining glory of the bar. The 
 world may frown, friends fall off, children rebel, wife desert or betray ; but 
 the client has an adherent whose faith never fails ; whose loyalty never 
 wavers ; true through good report and evil report ; true to death and to the 
 memory which survives death. It is the wise policy of the law that the 
 lawyer should be the legal alter ego of his client. And legal annals bear a 
 noble monument of justice well administered, to the controversial fidelity 
 of lawyers to their clients, in proceedings everywhere according to the 
 course of the common law. 
 
 The bar does not claim to be the communion of saints. It only claims to 
 be a noble organization of fallible men, in a fallible society. It concedes 
 that all lawyers sometimes blunder in professional service ; that many 
 sometimes sin against professional duty ; that some are incompetent and 
 some are vicious. But it asserts its own dignity and integrity, by a greater 
 contempt than the world has for its dunces, by a severer reprobation of its 
 knaves. 
 
 Let the dunces pass. As Dogberry say-s, their talent is the gift of fortune. 
 Society is too full of dunces to spare a contribution to all the learned profes- 
 sions. And the dunces of the world are altogether too respectable and 
 influential a class to be criticised with safety. Indeed, the professional 
 dunce is too mere a negative to be worth separate consideration. It is not 
 so with the knaves. They point professional vices, and a glimpse at them. 
 
30 
 
 they are not worth more than a gHmpse, will serve for shade in the likeness 
 of the true lawyer. 
 
 Behold the pettifogger, the blackleg of the law. He is, as his name im- 
 ports, a stirrer up of small litigation ; a wet nurse of trifling grievances and 
 quarrels. He sometimes emerges from professional obscurity, and is charged 
 with business which is disreputable only through his own tortuous devices. 
 For the vermin cannot forego his instincts, even among his betters. He is 
 generally found, however, and he alway begins, in the lowest professional 
 grade. Indeed he is the troglodyte of the law. He has great cunning. He 
 mistakes it for intelligence. He is a fellow of infinite pretence. He pushes 
 himself everywhere, and is self-important wherever he goes. You will 
 often find him in legislative bodies, in political conventions, in boards of 
 supervisors, in common councils. He is sometimes there for specific vil- 
 lainy ; sometimes on general principles of corruption, waiting on Provi- 
 dence for any fraudulent job. He is always there for evil. The temper of 
 his mind, the habits of his life, make him essentially mischievous. In all 
 places, he is always dishonest. When he cannot cheat for gain, he cheats for 
 love. He haunts low places, and herds with the ignorant. It is his kindly 
 office to set them by the ears, and to feed his vanity and his pocket, from 
 the quarrels he incites or foments. He is in everybody's way, and pries 
 into everybody's business. He meddles in all things, and .is indefatigable in 
 mischief. He is just lawyer enough to be mischievous. He is a living 
 example of Pope's truth, that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Among 
 his ignorant companions, he is infallible in all things. Sometimes he is 
 reserved and sly, with knowing look which gains credit for wisdom and 
 character, for thinking all he does not utter. Generally he is loquacious, 
 demonstrative of his small eloquence. Then his tongue is too big for his 
 mouth, and his mouth is too loose for truth. By his own account he is full 
 of law and overflowing. Among his credulous dupes he cannot keep it 
 down. He knows all things. Nothing is new to him. Nothing surprises 
 him. Nothing puzzles him. But it is in the law that his omniscience 
 shows best. His talk is of law incessantly. He has a chronic flux of law, 
 among his followers. He prates law mercilessly to everyone, except law- 
 yers. He discourses of his practice and his success to the janitor of his 
 office and the chairwoman who washes his windows. He revels in demon- 
 strative absurdity, and boasts of all he never did. He is the guide, philoso- 
 pher, and friend of vicious ignorance. He is the oracle of dullness : 
 
 And still the wonder grows. 
 That one small head can carry all he knows. 
 
 He hangs much round justices' courts. There he is the leader of the bar. 
 But he finds his way into courts of record. In them he is a plague to the 
 bar and an oflTense to the bench. He is flippant, plausible, captious, inso- 
 
31 
 
 lent. He is full of sharp practice, chicane, surprise and trick. He is the 
 privateer of the court, plundering on all hands, on private account. He is 
 ready to sell his client or himself. He is equal to all things, above nothing, 
 and below nothing. He is ready to be the coroner of the county, or the 
 chief justice of the United States. He would be a bore, if he were not too 
 dangerous for that harmless function. He is a nuisance to the bar and an 
 evil to society. He is a fraud upon the profession and the public ; a lawyer 
 among clowns and a clown among lawyers. 
 
 There is a variety of the animal, known by the classic name of Shyster. 
 He has forced the word into at least one dictionary, and I may use it with- 
 out offense. This is still a lower specimen: the pettifogger pettifogged 
 upon ; a trof^lodyte who penetrates depths of still deeper darkness. He has 
 all the common vices of the family, and some special vices of his own. This 
 creature frequents criminal courts, and there delights in criminal .practice. 
 He is the familiar of bailiffs and jailors ; and has a sort of undefined part- 
 nership with them, in thieves and ruffians and prostitutes. These he defends 
 or betrays, according to the exigencies of his relations with their captors or 
 prosecutors. He has confidential relations with those who dwell in the de- 
 batable land between industry and crime. He is the friend of pimps and 
 fences. He has intimacies among the most vicious men and women. He is 
 the standing counsel of gambling dena and houses of ill-fame. He knows 
 all about the criminals in custody, and has extensive acquaintance among 
 those at large. He is conversant with their habits of life, and calls them 
 familiarly by their christian names. He prowls round the purlieus of jails 
 and penitentiaries, seeking clients, inventing defenses, organizing perjury, 
 tampering with turnkeys, and tolling prisoners. He levies blackmail on all 
 hands. His effrontery is beyond all shame. He thinks all lawyers are as 
 he, but not so smart. He believes in the integrity of no man ; in the virtue 
 of no woman. He loves vice better than virtue. He enjoys darkness rather 
 than light. His habits of life lead him to the back lanes and dark ways of 
 the world. He is the counsel of guilt. He is the Attorney General of 
 crime. 
 
 Akin to these in mischief, but mischief of more subtle and dangerous 
 type, and different in quality ; less manifestly scandalous, but of deeper cor- 
 ruption and far more pernicious ; is the professional adventurer who trades 
 in judicial favor. Nepotism is a grave social evil, foisting vicious or incom- 
 petent officers into public service, and subjecting public intereste to inci- 
 dental injury. But judicial nepotism strangles the very life of the judicial 
 function ; deposes justice from her own bench, and seats in her place, decked 
 in her robes and masquerading in her semblance, the harlot of profligate 
 family interest ; to cozen truth and right, property and honor ; to betray all 
 that is dear to man or tends to make life happy or holy ; to poison the very 
 bread of life ; in order to feed the unhallowed avarice of the judge's kind- 
 
n 
 
 red. There are other conditions of judicial favoritism, but this is the com- 
 monest and most constant ; and I speak of all, in speaking of this. It would 
 be waste of words to denounce' the ghastly enormity of this crime ; all the 
 more deadly and heinous, because it is so subtle and impalpable. All 
 human sense comprehends it. All human conscience sickens before the 
 thought of the deadly hypocrisy and obscene atrocity, of this prostitution of 
 the holiest human function. And it is the trafficker who is in question now, 
 rather than the traflSck. Sometimes, but rarely, he is indeed a lawyer. A 
 lawyer's professional pride would almost always revolt from the degrada- 
 tion of such a shameful condition of. success; of lying in the embrace of 
 judicial prostitution, and accepting the wages of judicial shame. I haye 
 known good and honorable lawyers, to whom the accidental seeming of a 
 judge's partiality, gave a sense of deep humilation. True pride of life 
 scorns to eat the bread of shame. It is a poor pride, which wUl not rebel 
 against guilty dependence on another's profligacy. The judicial pimp, is 
 therefore, seldom a lawyer. He is almost inevitably a mere pretender, with- 
 out professional education ; a quack, who despises honoroble learning, of 
 which he stands so little in need. He is an intruder into the profession, 
 who never knows its worth or temper ; whose dim mind is never penetrated 
 by the light of jurisprudence ; whose dull pulse never feels the faintest 
 throb of a lawyer's true ambition ; who comes into the profession by some 
 back-door, under judicial patronage, to trade in justice, as his betters trade 
 in other merchandise. He never draws a pleading, or makes a brief, or 
 tries a cause. He cannot. These he leaves to associated lawyers. Fees are 
 the only professional duty he understands ; and these he takes, not for ser- 
 vices he does not render, but for favor he does secure. And business flows 
 in upon him. And clients crowd about him, not trusting to the retained 
 nephew, or son, or brother, but to the propitiated uncle, or father, or brother. 
 He is a legal huckster. Justice is his commodity. His trade is both infa- 
 mous and precarious, and intelligent roguery can find itself a better. So he 
 is almost always a dunce; a fellow of low intellect and vitality ; of meagre 
 life ; of mean and selfish instincts and tastes ; dull of head and cold of 
 heart ; of little passion and no impulse ; so cold and clammy that he might 
 have been a fish ; a creature whose lean brain and thin blood, cautious 
 egotism and .^elfish greed, would iit him, as for a.s they go, for store or bank 
 or factory, conducted on purely economic principles ; but could fill no 
 honest place in a lawyer's office. A quick-tempered or warm-hearted rogue 
 could never fill the favorite's place. It requires a fellow of no pity to miti- 
 gate his thrift, and of no temper to betray his confederacy. So you find him 
 a grave, quiet, sedate sharper ; guarded, formal, presuming, dogmatic, with 
 as little taste for fun as talent for honor. In his intercourse of business, he 
 rarely speaks of his uncle, or father, or cousin, the judge ; but he utters no 
 words to client or adversary, in which the judicial infiuence is not implied, 
 
23 
 
 like the verb, soruiitiraes in grammar, which gives significance to the whole 
 sentence. He is indignant at the slightest reference to the nepotism. But 
 he is virtuous abojit expression only ; the thing he wishes always under- 
 stood. It is his stock in trade, his family estate. Indeed he luxuriates in 
 the common apprehension of it, and suns his shame in open day, as the 
 harlot parades her professional finery. And yet this charlatan holds up 
 his head, and is permitted to hold it, as gentlemen among gentlemen, and 
 lawyer among lawyers. Visibly eating the bread of shame and wearing its 
 livery, he accosts honorable lawyers as a brother of the law. He is some- 
 times even admitted by them as an associate. In his modest confidences 
 with them, he sometimes goes so far as to complain that his uncle's place 
 upon the bench is a trouble to his delicate mind ; that it gives him no ad- 
 vantage, and yet causes him scandal ; and that his professional business 
 would be as great without it, and more agreeable to his sensitive feelings. 
 And the fellow knows that this is known for a lie ; but that is in keeping. 
 For his profession is a lie. He is not a lawyer ; he is an imposter. 
 
 Tliese are the chief plagues of the profession, and its disgrace — the camp 
 followers of the bar. I have sketched them, to tell you of each 
 
 Hie niger e.st, hunc tu, Bomane, caveto. 
 
 These are the barnacles of the profession, which cluster on its bottom and 
 form its dirty part. But they are parasites, rather in the profession than of 
 it. They are only seen on close inspection. A broad, generous, philosophic 
 view of the profession, from without does not notice them. The noble aim 
 of the profession, its character and place in society, its high and holy ofiice, 
 are unaffected by such accidental and incongruous blemishes. See it sweep 
 through the generations, the glorious bar; administering justice; preserv- 
 ing order ; not only defending and consolidating the institutions of civiliza- 
 tion, but pointing the way and leading the van, in the course of all safe 
 and solid progress; the constituted and faithful guardian, uuiicr the law, of 
 all true human liberties. In all free countries, the love of right, the broad 
 views, the disciplined mind, the educated skill of the bar, have made it a 
 potent political agent. In this country, they made it in great degree, the 
 teacher and leader of parties. In the absence of all privileged orders, they 
 made it a virtual power in politics, a quasi aristocracy of cultured talent. 
 Think of the great parties and their leaders. Think of the congresses and 
 their great men. Take the lawyers from the leaders and statesmen, and 
 see how sorely thinned the ranks would be. We may b(>ast of our democ- 
 racy as we will. Organized leadership, and intellectual aristocracy, is 
 essential to a free country. And though others have filled and are filling 
 many great places in the ranks, the American aristocracy of brain is sub- 
 stantially the American bar. So it has been and so it will be. We depre- 
 cate party, but party, is necessary to free government. For good and for 
 
24= 
 
 evil, party has done great work in this land. And it will. Old parties 
 seem to be passing away. The grand old party, which I have long loved 
 and served, which I hope I may not survive, seems to have forgotten its 
 principles. The other great party, greater now ig power and place, yet 
 with fewer and lesser historical claims to reverence, seems to have outlived 
 its principles. There is an odor of political decomposition in the air. The 
 spirit seems moving on the face of the waters. New parties are likely to 
 arise. Those of us who have grown old in old parties, are generally too 
 little pliant to new policies, too true to the past, to take new party service. 
 For one, I never will. But you, gentlemen, are young and free. The gene- 
 ration of lawyers to whom I belong has nearly passed away, and will have 
 no leadership in new parties. That will soon fall to your professional 
 generation. It will soon claim the succession of the aristocracy of intellect. 
 Imitate your grandfathers of the bar, the great generation of lawyers which 
 preceded mine, and gave Webster to the bar and Taney to the bench. Play 
 your allotted part, with their courage and ability, and with fidelity to the 
 spirit of our noble profession. 
 
 In the past, it was Greek with Greek. Intellect was the only antagonist 
 of intellect. The brief revolt of money against brain, in the last days of 
 the United States Bank, was convulsive and insignificant. And the grasp- 
 ing claims of manufacturers have rested more on the brain, than on the 
 Capital, of New England and Pennsylvania. But there is looming up a 
 new and dark power. I cannot dwell upon the signs and shocking omens 
 of its advent. The accumulation of individual wealth seems to be greater, 
 than it ever has been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. And the 
 enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of un- 
 exampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but 
 for political power. We see their colors, we hear their trumpets, we dis- 
 tinguish the sound of preparation in their camps. For the first time really 
 in our politics, money is taking the field as an organized power. It is un- 
 scrupulous, arrogant, and overbearing. Already, here at home, one great 
 corporation has trifled with the sovereign power, and insulted the state. And 
 there is grave fear that it and its great rival have secretly confederated, to 
 make partition of the state and share its spoils. Wealth has its rights. In- 
 dustrious wealth has its honors. These it is the duty of the law to assert 
 and protect, though wealth has great power of self-protection influence be- 
 yond the limits of integrity. But money, as a political influence, is essen- 
 tially corrupt ; is one of the most dangerous to free institutions ; by far the 
 most dangerous to the free and just administration of the law. An aristo- 
 cracy of money is essentially the coarsest and rudest, the most ignoble and 
 demoralizing, of all aristocracies. Here it comes, a competitor for social 
 ascendency. It is entitled to fear, if not to respecot. The question will 
 arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall 
 
25 
 
 rule — ^wealth or man ; which shall lead — money or intellect ; who shall fill 
 public stations — educated and patriotic freeman, or the feudal serfs of cor- 
 porate capital. Gentlemen, when; money wages that war on intellect, the 
 country will demand : Videant jurisconmlii ne quid republiea detrimenti capiat. 
 Look to it in that day, that the bar do not suffer the disgrace of permitting 
 mere money, the successful grambler's stake in Wall street, to assume the 
 functions of intellect, so long and largely shared by our profession. 
 
 It is said that he that girdeth on his harness, should not boast himself, as 
 he that putteth it off. That depends, perhaps, on the conditions under 
 which it is put on and taken off. In the battle of life, we all stumble, wei 
 are all maimed. Few, if any, lay down their arms, in that battle, without 
 sense of failure or defeat. It is fit to lay off that armor, at the call of the 
 trumpet, cheerfully but humbly. It is better -for society that the young 
 should put it on joyfully and hopefully at least, if not boastfully, as a briSe- 
 groom puts on his wedding garment. I trust that you are so putting on 
 your professional armor ;. resolute and full of confidence, that in your day 
 at the bar, order shall be preserved, law ameliorated, civilization raised, 
 justice truly administered. I hope that you and your generation of lawyers 
 may play well your part towards these results. I pray that when all of our 
 great profession, you of your generation and we of ours, shall stand in turn 
 before the bar of the great and final Judge, the alpha and omega of all law 
 and all judgment, we may be each found to have so contributed to the ad- 
 ministration of justice here, that we may find mercy there. Once more, I 
 welcome you to the Wisconsin Bar. And for a farewell, I wish unto you, 
 in the words of grand old Coke, the gladsome light of jurisprudence, the 
 loveliness of temperance, the stability of fortitude, and the solidity of 
 justice. 
 
ADDRESS OF HON. MATT. H. CARPENTER. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: 
 
 It is the office of the schools to develope and discipline the faculties of 
 the mind, and give the student that control over his mental powers which 
 will enable him to accumulate knowledge. These advantages you have 
 enjoyed. To-night ends your schoolboy days, and, as you are about to leave 
 the college, are saying farewell to tutors and professors, and are ready to 
 separate from each other, each to take his own path in life, I come from the 
 practical walks of that profession to which your lives are to be devoted, to 
 welcome you at the threshold, to give you the right hand of fellowship, and 
 to bid you God-speed in your attempt to master our complicated American 
 jurisprudence, and thus to become valiant champions of law, and faithful 
 priests in the temple of justice. 
 
 This is to you the most trying, painful, and critical period of your whole 
 lives ; and the next ten years will assure your success, or seal your doom, as 
 lawyers. You have already formed and matured your character as students ; 
 you are now to hew out your statue, and carve your fortunes, in the profes- 
 sion. Thus far you have been assisted by friendly and almost paternal 
 solicitude ; when you have faltered or stumbled in the ascent, gentle hands 
 have guided and lifted you over your difficulties, until now you plainly see 
 the way before you, and are thoroughly qualified to walk therein. 
 
 In the proper stage of their development, the lioness leads her young 
 into the wilderness, and there leaves them alone ; and the gnawings of hun- 
 ger, the peltings of pitiless storms, and the desolation of absolute savagenesa, 
 are the incentives which drive them on to become monarchs of the forest. 
 So your teachers have led you to the field of your life effijrts ; they have 
 taught you the duties, and shown you the prizes of the profession ; they 
 have given you the necessary training, and here they must leave you, each 
 one to himself. Your future is your own, and you alone must answer for 
 ita fiiilurea or its successes. And whether you ought to be congratulated or 
 sympathized with on your choice of a calling, depends entirely upon the 
 stuff you are made of. The path before you is steep, rugged, and thorny. 
 
38 
 
 Your temptations will be great, your toil prodigious, your success uncertain. 
 But here, where the roads divide, you should choose at once and forever be- 
 tween the objects of conflicting ambitions. If you are fired witli a desire to 
 attain great eminence in your profession ; if you consent to days of toil and 
 nights of anxiety ; if you are willing to wait, and labor unfalteringly while 
 you wait, for the long deferred fruits of hope ; if you have a courage which 
 can survive many disappointments and much disaster; if you can bear to 
 see your associates outstrip you in the accumulation of wealth and political 
 honors ; if you can endure to see your younger brother lead his bride to the 
 altar, while yours, all wooed and won, is waiting for you to attain success 
 if, in a word, you have that undying ambition and immortal energy to 
 " bear the constant anguish of patience," and labor forever ; then, sir, you 
 may make a lawyer ; and your profession will oifer you prizes worthy the 
 contention of gods. But if this picture be too dark, the reality, which will 
 be darker yet, will prove too much for you, and I bid you turn back at once 
 into gentler, more immediately profitable, and infinitely more comfortable 
 pursuits, and waste no more time coquetting with a profession which will 
 not benefit you, and which you will only harm and dishonor. 
 
 But to you who, counting the cost, still resolve, I desire to make a few 
 plain and practical suggestions. You are supposed to be as full of theory 
 as is consistent with your mental health ; and the question immediately be- 
 fore you is, what to do. So I shall not attempt to burden you with elaborate 
 disquisitions, but tell you a few things that I feel would have bfen beneficial 
 to me, when, like you, I was ready to go forth and struggle in the great tasks 
 of' life. 
 
 The first, and a very important matter to be determined, is location. This 
 question, in general, is very easy to be decided ; for I assume that every one of 
 you, who has suflicient enterprise to succeed at all, will immediately bend 
 his steps toward the West or South. If you are poor, and I hope you are — 
 for I regard that as an almost indispensable condition of your success — the 
 expenses of living in the large cities of the East will drive you into the 
 current of empire westward ; or to the South, which, now released from the 
 incubus of slavery, is destined to unparalleled prosperity within the next 
 quarter of a century. At all events, leave Washington, where a man is 
 estimated according to the place he is in ; and not accordmg to the qualities 
 that are in him ; let not the grass grow under your feet, nor the sunset upon 
 your going ; but flee this town as the beloved of the Lord fled the cities of 
 the plain. Select some town which will grow, and grow with it ; some town 
 where the hammer and the saw are constantly heard ; and the harmony of 
 various industry will cheer you on. If you find the right place, it is no ob- 
 jection that many lawyers are already there. That fact merely attests the 
 existence of business, and it is a business place you desire to find. There 
 may be a thousand lawyers in a city, but a score of the best of them will do 
 
39 
 
 all that business wliich the real lawyer loves to do ; the next hundred will 
 be engaged in preparing business ; the balance will be the raiders and bum- 
 mers of the profession, skirmishing for subsistence, as opportunity offers, 
 within or without the lines. Having fixed on the town, select an office, and 
 furnish it comfortably with the first money you earn; but first of all, im- 
 mediately store it with all the books you can borrow the money to buy. 
 
 The statutes and reports of your adopted state and best elementary works • 
 will, of course, be indlspensible. Ne.xt, buy the New York reports, which 
 will furnish you with ingeniously reasoned cases on every side of every 
 question ; and then, to relieve a little the bewilderment of the inexperi- 
 enced mind, tossed to and fro by reading New York decisions, you will need 
 the .sobering influence and steady support of the Massachusetts reports ; and 
 then — if any part of the Constitution of the United States be left — you 
 will need the decisions of the Federal Courts. Next, and before the reports 
 of other states, I would buy all the English Common Law and Chancery 
 reports, and continue them with the present series, bringing the decisions of 
 the English courts within a few weeks after their actual delivery. Then 
 you want the English Statutes and State Trials ; and then the reports of the 
 American States not before procured. 
 
 You should also be purchasing, pari passu, and as fast as possible, all 
 those works which belong to the border land between literature and the 
 law, the best trealises upon the science of politics and of government, con- 
 stitutional histories, English and American ; especially you should have 
 and know by heart, Lewis on the Reasonings and Methods and Politics, and 
 Austin on the Province of Jurisprudence, together with the works of emi- 
 nent English and American lawyers and statesmen — Burke, Sheridan, 
 Webster, Calhoun, etc., etc. — by no means neglecting the philosophers and 
 poets, theology and history — and be sure to have the best copies money 
 will buy of Shakespeare and Waverly ; so that when the misfortunes of life 
 multiply upon you, and its clouds settle low ; when the courts, by horrible 
 blundering, decide a good cause against you, which, decided correctly, 
 would have brought fame and fat fees ; when your landlord is impatient for 
 rent, and your heart cast down before the rugged realties of life, you may 
 restore your spirits in the sweet fields of innocent fiction and divine fancy. 
 
 But, may be, some of you have rich fathers. If so, this misfortune may 
 be lightened by an immediate understanding of the utmost cent he can fur- 
 nish you for the next ten years. Take this sum and invest all but five hun- 
 dred dollars in books, and take your seat, in the next train that leaves for 
 the West. Wealth thus employed will not delay your progress. And not 
 to be too hard on the rich, I ought to say that a man with more money than 
 can easily be invested in books, may become a lawyer. A rich man may 
 possibly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven — so a rich man may possibly 
 become a good lawyer ; but I always pity him when I think how fearfuUr 
 the chances are against him. 
 
30 
 
 But, to go back ; when you have selected your location, rented an office — 
 a good lawyer never owns one — and gathered as many books as you can to 
 start with, it is possible you will not be retained before breakfast, the first 
 day, in more than fourteen causes. Not to treat so solemn a subject with 
 levity, it is probable that for some time you will not have a case; and for a 
 long time cases will not crowd upon you. And it is to this pause, interven- 
 • ing between the school and the active labors of the bar, that I desire to 
 direct your minds. This period will try your patience, your fortitude, your 
 constancy ; and then you will lay deep and broad the foundations of great 
 professional acquirements, or prove yourselves unequal to the requirements 
 of professional life. Let these years of waiting for business be devoted to 
 acquiring a thorough and ripe knowledge of the law for which your study 
 thus far has only fitted you to strive. 
 
 The most important suggestion I can make to you in this connection is to 
 adopt some definite system of study. Let your first act be to frame rules for 
 your own conduct. Determine how many and what hours of each day you 
 will devote to exercise, to study and to rest respectively ; and then divide 
 the hours of study systematically between diflTerent departments of juris- 
 prudence. For instance, from ten to eleven each day read nothing but 
 treatises and reports upon equitable jurisprudence. From eleven to twelve 
 devote to evidence. From twelve to one to pleading and practice, and so on. 
 It is not so material what your method may be, as that you should have a 
 method ; and then adhere to your rules for one year, and you will be as- 
 tonished at the result. The mind is relieved by variety of labor, and 
 strengthened by the habit of studying the same subject at the same hour of 
 the day, and under the same surrounding-ciroumstances. 
 
 Another suggestion. Devote one hour each day, or two in every evening, 
 to reading the opinions of the most celebrated judges. For example, take 
 the reports of the Supreme Court of the United States, and turn to the first 
 opinion delivered by Chief Justice Marshall, and then to his next, and so 
 on, until in this way yoii have read every opinion he ever delivered. Mark 
 the growth of his great mind as it steadily developed itself; mark how 
 honestly he reasons. When you are half way through some of his opin- 
 ions you will be enabled to see which way the case is to be decided ; and 
 you will be impressed with the belief that he did not, at that point even 
 himself know where his reasoning would lead him, or which party, the 
 plaintifi" or the defendant, would be successful. He commences with a clear 
 statement of the facts ; next, in vnathematical method, he lays down the 
 axioms or universally conceded principles applicable to the subject; then 
 he begins to reason, turning the mill of his inexorable logic slowly and 
 honestly, as if himself was anxious to see what would come out of it ; and, 
 finally, that ascertained, the case is thereby decided, and so decided that no 
 man, recognizing the authority of reason, ever can question the correctness 
 
31 
 
 of the decision. Take the opinions of Chief Justices Parsons, or Parker, 
 or Shaw, of Massachusetts ; or Kent, or Spencer, of New York ; confining 
 yourself to one until you have read, in the order in which they were de- 
 livered, every opinion he has written. You will thus become almost per- 
 sonally acquainted with every judge ; you will learn his methods, and his 
 defects, if he has any ; and, like a personal acquaintance, this will enable 
 yon years afterwards, in the confusion of a trial, to appreciate the just force 
 and weight of an opinion from either of your favorites which your oppon- 
 ent will read agaiist you when you have no opportunity to examine it in 
 detail. The opinions of Chief Justice Gibson, thoroughly understood, 
 would make any man a profound lawyer. 
 
 But of ?11 the judges, English or American, whose opinions are valuable 
 to the student. Chief Justice Marshall stands pre-eminent. If you will de- 
 vote two hours of every evening for six months to his opinions, you will 
 master them all. What a mine to bring into possession. Study him especi- 
 aUy. Study his methods of reasoning, and make them your methods. And 
 while reading Marshall's opinionss, as often as you come to a case that was 
 argued by Mr. Webster, study his argument ; study it first, and then go to 
 Marshall's opinion in deciding the case ; and see how much that you thought 
 unanswerable in the argument found its way into the opinion. Thus you 
 will obtain pure gold refined by fire. 
 
 I recollect reading, while a student, the argument of Mr. Webster upon 
 the question of the constitutionality of State insolvent laws, as fully re- 
 ported in Mr. Everett's edition of Mr. Webster's works, and] before I knew 
 how the case was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. While 
 reading that argument, I was carried along captive through paragraph after 
 paragraph, from proposition to proposition, and when I had finished it, I 
 never thought of looking to see how the case was decided, because I would 
 have made my affidavit that Webster's argument was wholly unanswerable, 
 and of course the case must have been decided with htm. And when I found 
 a year or two later, that the court decided the case the other way, I recol- 
 lect that I lost confidence in human reasoning for the space of ten days. 
 Nothing final ly consoled my disappointment except the fact that the great 
 Chief Justice dissented from the decision of the co'.irt, and canonized the 
 argument of Mr. Webster. But for this, a think I should have concluded 
 that logic waj an unsafe guide in the labyrinths of the law ; however, I 
 satisfied the wounded pride or my boyish judgment by resolving that Web- 
 ster and Marshall were greater authority than the rest of mankind com- 
 bined, and that Webster was right, though he did not succeed. 
 
 I have spoken thus far of the means by which you may best qualify your- 
 selves for the labors and responsibilities which belong to active practice at 
 the bar. And although I have dwelt somewhat at length upon the diflScul- 
 ties to be surmounted by the student, hoping to impress upon you the im- 
 
83 ^ 
 
 portanoe of not aBsuming that yon have now acquired your profession, and 
 have only to apply your present fund of knowledge to causes in which you 
 may be retained ; nevertheless, you are not to be discouraged. With the 
 fair average of ability, if yoa will pursue the metliods I have indicated, you 
 will rise to eminence in your profession ; and looking to the time when 
 your fame will begin to brighten, and your retainers to multiply, I desire to 
 make a few practical suggestions in regard to the conduct of causes by a 
 young lawyer in the courts. And first, let me exhort you to give all your 
 cases a thorough examination, and an elaborate preparation. Your first 
 case may only involve five dollars, and be ultimately determined by the 
 wisdom of a justice of the peace. Nevertheless, it will involve the same 
 principles, and be beset by the same difficulties, as a case, growing out of the 
 same state of facts, involving five millions of dollars, and pending in the 
 Supreme Court of the United States. To illustrate, you may be retained to 
 defend in ajustices's court an action founded on a promissory note for fifty 
 dollars, given by a man in New England to a creditor, residing in New 
 York, just before your client failed and ran away to the far west, where he 
 has resided in two or three different States. There is not a principle of com- 
 mercial law, relating to negotiable paper, that may not be involved 
 in your case. ' The note may have in your been given upon usurious 
 consideration, or have been obtained by fraud, or duress ; and 
 these questions are to be decided upon the same principles that 
 would determine a case involving millions of dollars. Your case too, may 
 involve the most difficult and complicated questions in the conflict of laws . 
 Whether the rate of interest is to be six per cent, accordingto the law of the 
 place where the note was given, or the higher rate of interest of New 
 York where the creditor resided ; or if your client has resided in different 
 States since giving the note, you may have to examine to statutes of limita- 
 tion in those States, to ascertain whether he has resided long enough in any 
 one State, to make its statute a bar to the claim. I remember one of the 
 earliest cases I tried was of a note for forty dollars, given under the following 
 state^of facts ; a resident of Massachusetts loaned money in that State to a 
 resident of Wisconsin, to be secured after my client should return to \Yis- 
 consin, by mortgage upon land in that State. This loan was clearly usuri- 
 ous, and the creditor subsequently came to Wisconsin, and my client gave 
 him this forty dollar note in part settlement of the original indebtedness, 
 and made the note payable on six months at Chicago, with exchange on 
 Boston. The legal rate of interesti in Massachusetts was six per cent., in 
 Wisconsin twelve per cent., and in Illinois, where the last note was payable, 
 ten per cent.; and it so happened that the statutes of theje three States 
 provided three different penalties for, or consequences of, usurious transac- 
 tions. You can see that this case, in a justice court, involving only forty 
 dollars, embraced some of the most complicated and difficult questions' th t 
 can ever arise in any cause in any court. 
 
33 
 
 Now, this is a long introduction to what I desire to say. Take such a 
 case, with the leisure you will have on your hands, and give it the proper 
 preparation, and you will accomplish several most important things. First, 
 you will fix in your mind with clearness many important legal principles, 
 which will remain with you as long as you live. Second, you will satisfy 
 the court that you are in the habit of preparing your causes, and thus gain 
 greater consideration from the court. And third, and more important still, 
 you will acquire a facility for investigating legal questions which can be 
 acquired only in that way, and which will serve yon to the end of your pro- 
 fessional life. Every successful lawyer who has been in practice for twenty 
 years, will tell you that he can go to his library .now and examine more 
 authorities and make more preparation of a cause in three hours, than he 
 could in three weeks when he commenced the practice. In no other way 
 than by preparing causes can you acquire this facility, which is so indispens- 
 able to a lawyer in full practice. It is in the mind what the cunning of the 
 fingers is to the musical performer. No man is born with it ; any intelli- 
 gent man may acquire it. 
 
 Be honest with the court. I have said that you will be subjected to great 
 temptations. In your early causes you will be far more anxious, and more 
 deeply interested to succeed, than your client. To him it may be ten dol- 
 lars, or fifty, or a hundred or two ; with you it is success or failure, the ad- 
 miration or the contempt of the by-standers, life or death professionally. 
 Ih this fearful anxiety you will be sorely tried, and tempted to conceal your 
 blunders by coloring the facts, and to win your cause no matter how. I say 
 you will be tempted to do this, but I assume that you will have the manhood 
 and integrity to rise above the temptation. If not, your failure at the bar 
 is certain. A man who has never been tempted may be honest merely ; but 
 virtue, in the profession or out of it, is the fruit of temptation sufiered, but 
 overcome. Honesty is the best policy, and no man sees this proverb illus- 
 trated so frequently, and so vividly, as the lawyer. A trick or a falsehood 
 may win a point or save a cause ; but it is certain of discovery, and it will 
 cost its author ten years of 'honest practice to allay the indignation it will 
 incite in the breast of an honest judge. 
 
 Be always deferential and respectful to the court. Meet their rulings, no 
 matter how adverse or erroneous, with the true dignity of professional obe- 
 dience. But, while you are always respectful, be always firm. Courts are 
 composed of judges ; judges are men ; men who dine out late of nights ; 
 they comfi reluctantly at the summons of the court bell, from an unfinished 
 sleep ; they are overworked, they are poorly paid, and occasionally come to 
 the bench in that impatient and petulent mood which "sometime hath its 
 hour with every man." A judge in such a mood will " whistle your case 
 down the wind " before he has heard the first half of it. Under such cir- 
 cumstances, while you are to be courteous to the court, you must be as firm 
 
34 
 
 aa a rock, The beat recipe for obtaining your rights before an impatient 
 judge, is to ac<iuire the art of clear and concise narrative. In motions made 
 and incidental questions arising in a cause, half are decided erroneously, 
 because the court does not understand the facts, or the state of the record, 
 upon which the decision depends. I think one of the great deficiencies of 
 the profession, in daily practi le, is the want of this art. To train your- 
 selves in this particular, study the best models of historic composition. 
 Take Kinglake's history of the Crimean war, for example, and read the 
 one or two hundred pages in which he describes the .charge of the light 
 brigade at Balaklava. Notice the innumerable incidents and trifling occur- 
 rences, and mark the consummate art with which they are so grouped and 
 arranged as never to obstruct, but always to heighten the efiect of the general 
 narrative. The facts of a case before a jury may be very voluminous and 
 very complicated, and there is nothing which so severely taxes the skill of 
 a master as to make every fact available, without so burthening the mind 
 of the jury that they will forget the facts altogether. The most trifling and 
 insignificant fact which is yet important enough to be given in evidence, 
 should be brought to the mind of the jury in the argument of the cause ; 
 but the facts should be so marshalled with regard to subjects and order of 
 time, that the jury can see the precise bearing of each. In an argument to 
 a jury the facts should be stated by chapter and verse, presented by scene 
 and act, as in Othello, one of the most artistic of Shakspeare's plays, where 
 the least circumstance, even Desdemona's dropping her handkerchief, is 
 made to contribute powerfully to the final and fatal catastrophe. 
 
 Another important matter is the examination of witnesses. I believe 
 that more causes are lost from unskillful examination of witnesses, than 
 from all other species of malpractice combined. Always know what your 
 witness is called to prove : direct his mind to that particular object ; get 
 through with him as quickly as possible. In cross-examining witnesses, if I 
 were to lay down one, and an invariable rule, it would be not to cross- 
 examine at all. In nine cases out of ten, where a witness testifies against 
 you, your cross-examination will make a bad matter worse. If you believe 
 a witness is honest, and only mistaken, treat him courteously, never touch 
 his pride, nor put him on the defensive. If you believe he is swearing 
 falsely, go down upon him like an avalanche. In ordinary cases never put 
 a question in cross-examination, unless it be to call out some new fact favor- 
 able to you ; and even then, I think, you had better wait and call him as 
 your own witness, and thus win his favor by showing confidence in his in- 
 tegrity ; thus you will frequently get from him very comforting things. 
 
 Be ever courteous to oppoaite counsel. You will find all sorts of men at 
 the bar. It is with the profession as with the church, the wheat and the 
 tares grow together. Your opponent may be a scamp, and you may know 
 it; but if in the particular cause he conducts himself like a gentleman, treat 
 
35 
 
 him accordingly. And, above all tilings, never break an oral stipulation. 
 It is well to be a little chary about making such stipulations, and they never 
 should be made except with a gentleman, because more may be claimed for 
 them than you intended to grant. 
 
 Never refuse a case because it will not pay a fee. Remember you go 
 forth to take your place in life, and exercise in all the relations of society 
 the influence of a learned and honorable profession. It is your mission to 
 uphold the right and overthrow the wrong, and, to the extent of your power 
 to see to it that justice be denied to no man. 
 
 But some one, who has listened thus far, may wonder where in all this 
 economy of professional life the money-making comes in. This is a matter 
 about which, I think, I ought to be perfectly frank, and, in strict profes- 
 sional confidence, I will tell you what the fact is ; that, with a good lawyer, 
 it never comes in at all ; it never comes into his mind ; it never distracts his 
 thoughts ; it never unsettles his soul. If money-making be your object in 
 life, go where money can be made ; go to the marts of commerce ; go to the 
 mines on the Pacific coast; sound for petroleum, or procure a contract for 
 furnishing blankets to the Indians. Go anywhere, do anything, except 
 into court to practice law. Money-changers have no place in the temple of 
 justice. But, while money must be discarded as an end with the lawyer, 
 still, as a means, it cannot wholly be disregarded, and you must at least look 
 after enough of the filthy dross to pay your bills. No man can be honest 
 who makes bills without the expectation of paying them ; and, as Mr. 
 Webster once said, it cannot be said of any dishonest man that he has the 
 law in his heart ; and on another occasion Mr. Webster said that a good 
 lawyer ought, when he died, to leave neither a dollar nor a debt ; and, as I 
 have quoted from Mr. Webster, I wUl quote from one of his friends, Mr. 
 Choate, a remark as characteristic of him as it was descriptive of Mr. 
 Webster. He once said to me, while a student in his office, in that half 
 tragic, half comic manner, which all who knew him so well remember : 
 " My boy, Mr. Webster was a remarkable man ; his contempt for cash was 
 eqiialled only by his contempt for creditors." This was the defect in Mr. 
 Webster's character, and a departure from his own maxim which I have 
 just quoted. Therefore, it is safe to say, you must make money enough to 
 pay your bills. 
 
 Save money if ycni tan. Money is power, and may be employed to ad- 
 vance all the useful ends of life : but how you are to do this, amid the 
 appeals for charity that will come Up around your path, with young men 
 on eyety hand soliciting material aid to acquire education and enter upon 
 the learned professions, with the widows and orphans and maimed soldiers 
 of the war, and with the unknown, unnumbered calls upon* your charity, 
 your generosity, and your affections — if you desire to know liow you are 
 to save money, you must inquire of somebody besides me. 
 
36 
 
 And yet the profession has its rewards. " Heaven is above all yet. 
 There sits a Judge," whose approbation is the lawyer's highest reward. 
 And even in this world tlie profession has its rewards. Who would think 
 of weighing gold against tears of gratitude, trickling down the cheek of 
 poverty, rescued by your ability, your courage, and your fidelity, from un- 
 merited doom ? You will remember how Mr. Seward, while at the bar, 
 without fee or reward, and braving the uproar of popular clamor, defended 
 a negro against the charge of murder on the plea of insanity, which, in the 
 popular belief, was a falsehood, although the fact was subsequently veriiied 
 by the death of the negro in an insane asylum. This was years ago — prior 
 to the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th amendments to the constitution — and 
 before the negro became an object' of national justice and political affection. 
 Mr. Seward has since passed through an eventful and illustrious career of 
 public life, during which he has " sounded all the depths and shoals of 
 honor,'' and has finally retired to Auburn to collect his thoughts and com- 
 pose his soul before leaving the shores of time to enter upon an eternal 
 career beyond the celestial gates. And methinks, as he sits in that tranquil 
 retreat, looking out upon the uneasy and stormy world, where " restless 
 mediocrity " is rising to the surface to-day to sink out of sight to-morrow, 
 and looking back over the incidents of his busy life, be would not exchange 
 the recollection — the consciousness of duty performed, in rescuing this un- 
 fortunate individual of a degraded race, smitten wito mental malady, and in 
 peril of the prejudice, the passions, the rage of the populace, more fearful 
 than maladies — for the largest fee he ever received, or for the memory of 
 the proudest achievement of his political life. Tliis conspicuous act of pro- 
 fessional bravery and charity will grow brighter and brighter through Mr. 
 Seward's mortal life, and when he shall stand before the Son of Man at that 
 fearful winnowing which shall separate the wheat from the chaff, that awful 
 judgment which .shall forever divide the just from the unjust, he may point 
 to this act of his life which, eighteen hundred years before it was performed, 
 received the Master's approbation. • 
 
 " Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, come ye blessed 
 of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation 
 of the world: for I was an hungered and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, 
 and ye gave me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took me in : naked, and ye 
 clothed me : I was sick, and ye visited me : I was in prison, and ye came 
 unto me." 
 
 " Then shall the righteous answer him, saying. Lord, when saw we thee 
 an hungered, and fed thee ? Or thirsty, and gave thee drink ? When saw 
 we thee a stranger, and took thee in ? Or naked, and clothed thee ? Or 
 when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee ?" 
 
 " And the King shall answer, and say unto them, verily I say unto you, 
 inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my bretbern, ye 
 have done it unto me.'' 
 
37 
 
 I am detaing you too long, but in addition to all the things I have ad- 
 monished you to do, I must warn you of one thing not to do ; and I cannot 
 do this in a more effectual way than toquote again from my master whom 
 I loved and almost adored, and who has long since gone to the reward 
 which awaits an honorable career. I recollect upon one occasion, when he 
 had been counselling me as to the course to be pursued by a lawyer, he 
 said, with an emphasis and an energy which thrilled me through and 
 through and which I shall never forget — "Keep out of politics. Things 
 have come to that pass when no man can mingle in American politics without 
 sinking his self-respect." You may say this advice comes with bad grace 
 from myself, who have in some sense fallen before the great temptation. 
 Shakspeare tells us of a preacher who pointed his flock to the thorney patli, 
 himself taking the primrose way. The thorny path was the right way, and 
 the preacher gave his flock sound advice, though he himself failed to prac- 
 tice and profit by it. And if you have the slightest doubt of the soundneas 
 of the advice I have offered you, wait till you have achieved a respectable 
 position at the bar, and then accept a seat in the Senate, and I venture the 
 prediction that your judgment will condemn your weakness, as mine does 
 my own. In admonishing you to keep out of politics, of course I do not 
 mean that you are to sink your manhood, or waive the participation which 
 it is the right and duty of every American citizen to exercise in influencing 
 the.coui'se of political affairs. What I mean is that you should avoid office- 
 seeking and office-holding. «The judicial positions of the country are open 
 to the lawyer. The courts of the States and df the Union must be filled by 
 lawyers. And if you cannot endure to occupy the highest position in 
 Americen life — an eminent place at the bar — I beseech you stop on the 
 bench, and do not fall into the dirty pools of politics. Should the American 
 passion, ambition for place, seize and master you, let me point you to the 
 highest, the serenest, the grandest seat in the Union, the Chief Justiceship 
 of the judicial department of the United States. Who, in a healthy mental 
 condition, would exchange the calm dignity of the Chief Justiceship for 
 life to be tossed by politicians on an " uneasy blanket " in the White House, 
 for four or eight years ! 
 
 Gentlemen, there is no limit to what you may suffer from a speaker with- 
 out notes ; and I have indulged this license, and have already trespassed 
 upon you unreasonably. And yet there is one subject I must mention in 
 conclusion. In the economy of Providence every generation has its peculiar 
 duties, trials, triumphs. The Church, the only institution on earth with 
 eighteen hundred years of historic unity, has always had the wisdom to train 
 its priesthood to meet imment danger. When infidelity attacked the truths 
 of religion with the facts developed by material science, the Church in- 
 structed its ministry in that speciality ; and when the assaults upon religion 
 were made by verbal criticisms upon the text of the Gospel, the Church 
 
38 
 
 seilt forth its teachers specially instructed as to the intrinsic evidences of the 
 Gospel's truth. 
 
 Yon go forth to-day, young and strong, and full of hope, to discharge the 
 duties and meet the responsibilities belonging to our profession — the hand' 
 maid of free institutions,. What, then, is the special evil which you should 
 be charged to correct ? 
 
 We have but lately emerged from a fearful civil war, which has inflamed 
 the blood of sections, and embittered the passions of the people. During 
 ihe war whatever was necessary to be done had to be done. Constitutions 
 are made for men — not men for constitutions. Necessity is its own law, and 
 the manifest necessity of certain lines of governmental policy of doubtful 
 legal and constitutional validity, has naturally tended to create a popular 
 indifference to the Constitution and the laws, of which you go forth com- 
 missioned defenders. Some of you will be Democrats, and some of you 
 will be Republicans. As to all matters of mere political economy and 
 policy you may divide in Opinion and contend in action ; but you are to re- 
 member that whenever the slightest letter of the Constitution is imperilled 
 your are the sworn champions of that Constitution, and you must forget all 
 potitical differences and rally to its support like a priesthood rallying to 
 the defense of a holy shrine ; and if the Constitution shall |be stabbed to 
 to death by its foes, let not its expiring spirit turn upon you with the re- 
 proach, sharper thaii a thousand daggers, " et tu, Bi~ute." 
 
KF 211 R98 
 
 %-an, Edward George 
 
 Vol. 
 
 W 
 
 Title 
 
 Copy 
 
 'Addresses by Hon. Edward G --- j^ 
 Ryan, late chief justics of Wiscon. 
 
 Date 
 
 Borrower's Name