A Record of Bench and Bar

BY HERBERT HARLEY

of the Chicago Bar

NATHAN WILLIAM MACCHES

practice, with a clientele embracing some of the fore

most business interests of that city. His most essential characteristic, in my opinion, is his appreciation of social solidarity and social interdependence; this and his acute sense of social responsibility. A lawyer's experience develops and sharpens the faculty of differentiation; the lawyer observes differences more than resemblances. His sense of impersonal justice tends to make him think of human beings as bundles of rights coming

for

convenient him to close his eyes and seal his ears against evidences that present society as an infinitely complex, quivering, sentient body with intense needs, seeking a glorious goal beyond thrilling hazards. The philosophy of the lawyer, and especially the busy corporation practitioner, tends to become one of negation and skepticism. Although an overworked "corporation lawyer," assenting to the standard stock of legal fundaments, and employing the tools of his craft

in professional manner, Colonel MacChesney nevertheless lives an equally serious and busy life in that other field most briefly expressed by the words "social responsibility."

Nor is his philosophy one of negation. He has the realistic convictions of a primitive; life is real, life is earnest, with a definite goal beyond very real perils. Driven by these powerful affirmations, and controlled by this sense of social responsibility, apparently oblivious of fatigue, this unusual lawyer-soldier-social scientist type of individual employs the skill won in forensic struggles in so many fields of social endeavor that he is likely before long to become a veritable myth, understood in part by all men, in whole by none.

It is necessary to be explicit and emphatic with regard to his strictly professional life, to avoid the easy error of presenting him as a purely public character. It was fourteen years ago that he left the University of Michigan with his L.L. B. The law firm of which he is now senior member is a continuation of the firm of Carter & Becker, dating from 1858. It enjoys a high standing in real estate, banking, railroad, and corporation legal matters, and has participated in numerous litigated causes of local and general importance of a public nature. Mr. MacChesney is general counsel for the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges, as well as a director of several banks and manufacturing concerns, and owner individually of important urban real estate. For a number of years he was almost daily in the courts, but in recent years this work has perforce been delegated to other one can hardly say youngerassociates.

So it must be remembered that his other and almost bewildering activities are those indulged, not at the expense of professional time or energy, but at the expense of hours devoted by most successful lawyers to pleasure and recuperation, to golf, motoring, bridge, travel, or some more individual hobby. It is the fullness of use of this by-product time which makes the figure best known to divergent classes of men. It is a truism that character is most re

vealed in a man's avocations. With Colonel MacChesney these may be grouped as semi-professional, political, academic, editorial, social, charitable, religious, and military. Short of a three-volume biography some must be excluded.

In the semi-professional field lie his activities in the work of the organized bar. At the present time he is president of the Illinois State Bar Association, director of the American Judicature Society, and president of the Illinois Commission to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.

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In politics he has been active from student days, but not as an office holdHe has represented the National Republican Committee in campaign speaking in several states, and has sat in the inner circles of local Republican leaders, assisting particularly in the selection of judges.

His academic interests alone suffice to establish a standing. He is a trustee of Northwestern University, and has lectured in the College of Law of the University of Illinois and other institutions.

His writings in the field of property and corporation management, with respect to labor and child labor legislation, procedural reform, criminology, and military law, are numerous. He was one of the founders of the Illinois Law Review and the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, and as a member of the editorial boards of these journals he exerts a powerful and continuing influence. He is known for his authorship of "Abraham Lincoln-The Tribute of a Century," "The Prototype of American Citizenship," "The Significance of the War of 1812," "Race Development by Legislation," and so forth. He was selected by the bar to deliver the commemorative address on Abraham Lincoln before the supreme court of Illinois on the occasion of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, an account of which appears in the supreme court reports.

Colonel MacChesney is a director of

the United Charities of Chicago and other charitable associations, and has participated in downright intensive social work, bringing to this labor a knowledge of social science gleaned from wide reading and study in theoretical fields. He is an active lay supporter of the Presbyterian Church.

His interest in measures for national defense were doubtless inherited from a soldier sire. He was a National Guardsman in his teens, and has been identified with the National Guard of Arizona and California, as well as of Illinois. During the Spanish-American War he did garrison duty on the Pacific Coast, and is now Judge Advocate General of Illinois, with the title of Colonel in the Illinois National Guard. His recent articles on the constitutionality of pending legislation intended to make the National Guard effective for Federal purposes, in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, illustrate his command of this technical subject.

He is a member of various learned societies, of the Masonic Order, and of the University, Union League, City, Chicago Literary, Twentieth Century, and other clubs of Chicago, New York, and Washington.

Mr. MacChesney was born in Chicago June 2, 1878, a son of Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Brunson MacChesney (A. M., M. D., U. S. A.) and Henrietta (Milsom) MacChesney, (M. D.) of London, England. His first American ancestors came from Scotland in the colonial period, settling in Virginia, and his grandfather, for whom he was named, was a lieutenant in the War of 1812, afterwards becoming an Illinois pioneer and one of the founders of Knox College. His mother was a daughter of a member of the faculty of Oxford University, England, a regular graduate in medicine, and connected with hospitals in Chicago and New York, but never engaged in active practice.

Preparing at a Chicago high school, Nathan William MacChesney attended

and graduated from the University of the Pacific in 1898 (A.B.) and began professional study at Northwestern University School of Law, and in 1902 completed his course with a degree at Michigan, was admitted in that state and Illinois, and began practice in Chicago, continuing graduate work at Northwestern during that year.

On December 1, 1904, Mr. MacChesney married Miss Lena Frost, daughter of Mr. W. E. Frost, of Riverside, Illinois. Mrs. MacChesney is a graduate (A. B.) of the University of Michigan, 1901, and was later a student at the University of Berlin and the University of Chicago. sity of Chicago. They have one son, Alfred Brunson MacChesney, III., born in 1909.

I have endeavored to set forth the salient facts of a singularly interesting career not yet attained unto the meridian of life. My own opinion is that time will identify him especially with such work as attended the organization of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, of which he was second president, with his constructive court reform work as director of the American Judicature Society, with his work in the Conference on Uniform State Laws, and as an active member of the progressive ultra-professional group who seek to dignify the profession of law by making it more human, more useful, through closer organization of the bar. Essentially a worker in the ranks, sinking his identity in the common product of unselfish labor, such individual leadership as has fallen to his lot has been utilized for practical and definite gains for the causes which inspire his unrivaled powers, and, in a broad view, constitute a synthetic programme of civic and social advancement; for he is essentially, with his intense moral convictions, persuasive and forceful personality, acute critical discernment, varied experience, and impelling sense of responsibility, in the largest and fullest sense a legislator, a lawmaker.

"It is possible that our men of business and affairs, with their Yankee adaptability, their native optimism, and buoyancy of disposition, their fertility of invention, might somehow surmount all other difficulties and discouragements if they could ever throw off the incubus of anti-business legislation. This legislation is based on the assumption that the average business man is a scoundrel, -graded in rascality by the amount of goods found on his person, and that it is the pious duty of our virtuous legislators to protect the rest of us from his machinations. And so we are flyblown with laws deemed necessary to safeguard a new freedom that cannot be distinguished from an old thraldom. man to-day can do business and be legally honest if he tries; and if he is only morally honest he is headed for the lockup."

No

His addresses have brought about a consideration of Mr. Estabrook as a candidate for the Republican nomination. for President. He has received strong support in some of the primary elections.

Dean of College of Law of Southwestern University.

ANNOUNCEMENT has been made

of the appointment of Arthur J. Abbott, A.B., J.D., as permanent dean of the College of Law of Southwestern University at Los Angeles. The new dean has been the acting head of the Law School since April, 1915, having succeeded Hugh Evander Willis, who was the first dean of the institution, and who was previously, for several years, professor of law and secretary of the Law Faculty of the University of Minnesota. Dean Willis removed to Virginia in the spring of 1915.

Dean Abbott received his education