Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

of mine when he was beginning his professional life, "Don't know too much law," and I think we all can imagine cases where the warning would be useful. But a far more useful thing is what was said to me as a student by one no less wise and able, — afterwards my partner and always my friend, ,-when I was talking as young men do about seeing practice, and all the other things which seemed practical to my inexperience, "The business of a lawyer is to know law." The Professors of this Law School mean to make their students know law. They think the most practical teaching is that which takes their students to the bottom of what they seek to know. They therefore mean to make them master the common law and equity as working systems, and think that when that is accomplished they will have no trouble with the improvements of the last half-century. I believe they are entirely right, not only in the end they aim at, but in the way they take to reach that end.

Yes, this School has been, is, and I hope long will be, a centre where great lawyers perfect their achievements, and from which young men, even more inspired by their example than instructed by their teaching, go forth in their turn, not to imitate what their masters have done, but to live their own lives more freely for the ferment imparted to them here. The men trained in this School may not always be the most knowing in the ways of getting on. The noblest of them must often feel that they are committed to lives of proud dependence, — the dependence of men who command no factitious aids to success, but rely upon unadvertised knowledge and silent devotion; dependence upon finding an appreciation which they cannot seek, but dependence proud in the conviction

that the knowledge to which their lives are consecrated is of things which it concerns the world to know. It is the dependence of abstract thought, of science, of beauty, of poetry and art, of every flower of civilization, upon finding a soil generous enough to support it. If it does not, it must die. But the world needs the flower more than the flower needs life.

I said that a law school ought to teach law in the grand manner; that it had something more to do than simply to teach law. I think we may claim for our School that it has not been wanting in greatness. I once heard a Russian say that in the middle class of Russia there were many specialists; in the upper class there were civilized men. Perhaps in America, for reasons which I have mentioned, we need specialists even more than we do civilized men. Civilized men who are nothing else are a little apt to think that they cannot breathe the American atmosphere. But if a man is a specialist, it is most desirable that he should also be civilized; that he should have laid in the outline of the other sciences, as well as the light and shade of his own; that he should be reasonable, and see things in their proportion. Nay, more, that he should be passionate, as well as reasonable, that he should be able not only to explain, but to feel; that the ardors of intellectual pursuit should be relieved by the charms of art, should be succeeded by the joy of life become an end in itself.

[ocr errors]

At Harvard College is realized in some degree the palpitating manifoldness of a truly civilized life. Its aspirations are concealed because they are chastened and instructed; but I believe in my soul that they are not the less noble that they are silent. The golden light of the

[ocr errors]

University is not confined to the undergraduate department; it is shed over all the schools. He who has once seen it becomes other than he was, forevermore. I have said that the best part of our education is moral. It is the crowning glory of this Law School that it has kindled in many a heart an inextinguishable fire.

NOTE. The orator referred to on page 28 was James Russell Lowell; the poet was Oliver Wendell Holmes.

SIDNEY BARTLETT.

ANSWER TO RESOLUTIONS OF THE BAR,

BOSTON, MARCH 23, 1889.

GENTLEMEN OF THE BAR:

YOUR resolutions do not at all exaggerate the feelings which the Bench share with the Bar, and no one, I am sure, more than I, although my knowledge of Mr. Bartlett professionally is of a date which would seem late to some of you. When I came to the bar, Mr. Bartlett already had nearly completed his threescore and ten years, so that of what would have been his whole career, had he been another man, I cannot speak. I have, however, one reminiscence which I cherish, and which takes us back in imagination beyond the oldest memory. I hold in my hand a letter in which he says, "Deacon Spooner died in 1818 aged ninety-four. I saw him and talked with him. He talked with Elder Faunce, who talked with the Pilgrims and is said to have pointed out the rock."

It is not necessary to go behind what I can remember myself to bear witness to a great career. Between seventy and ninety Mr. Bartlett did work enough for the glory of an advocate's lifetime. I will not stop to mention famous cases, like that of the Merchants' Bank with the Government and the State Bank, or that of the Credit Mobilier, or other cases connected with the Union Pacific, but

will rather repeat what no doubt has been mentioned at your meeting, that the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced his arguments the ablest which they heard from any man in the country, and that the memory of one of those who thus spoke of him went back to the days of Webster.

Less than two months ago he argued two cases at this bar with almost unabated fire. I suppose that those who were most familiar with his methods would point out as one secret of his success the fact that from the first instant that he was retained he began to shape his case with reference to its remotest ends. He possessed the facts when another would not yet have anticipated a controversy. He took the evidence himself, having in view the principles of law upon which he expected finally to rest his case. You could mark his advent in a cause in the course of which he had been retained merely by reading the record.

But the day when he shone was when he came to argue the questions of law. His way of disregarding ramifications and cutting at the root alone you all remember too well to make description necessary. If I were asked to say what seemed to me his most striking characteristic, I think I should say style, — taking that word in a large sense. In that respect he often made me think of the eighteenth century, which sent him down to us. He had that terse and polished subtilty of speech which was most familiar to the world where courtiers and men of fashion taught the littérateurs of a later age how to write. He had something of the half-hidden wit which men learned to practise who lived about a court and had to speak in innuendo. He had much of the eighteenth century

[ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »