VOL. XVI. No. 3.
BOSTON.
MARCH, 1904.
ALTON B. PARKER, Chief-Judge of the New York Court of Appeals. By M'CREADY SYKES, Of the New York Bar. WHEN in 1897 Alton B. Parker was elected Chief-Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the court of last resort in that State (the so-called Supreme Court be ing the court of original and intermediate jurisdiction), he was forty-six years old. He was the youngest man who had ever been called to be the head officer of New York's judicial system. He had already been on the bench for twenty years, and he had sat for several years on a temporary "Second Divi sion" of the same Court of Appeals over which he was now called on to preside. For one so much of whose life had been spent in the comparative isolation of judicial duties he had had a remarkably active career: and he is a man whose temperament would be pretty apt to keep him out of any career that was not active. Judge Parker was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1851. Before he went to live at Kingston in 1871 he had taught school for a time at Accord. At Kingston he en tered the office of Schoonmaker and Hanlenburgh. He studied law at the Albany Law School and graduated and was admitted to the bar in 1872. That same year he formed the law firm of Parker and Kenyon. Everyone knows that outside of a few large cities, lawyers, and above all young lawyers, take to politics as ducks take to water. About the first thing that happened to young Parker was that he was made
clerk of the Ulster County Board of Super visors. Soon after he represented Ulster County in a protracted suit with the city of Kingston, involving the equalization of as sessments. This was Parker's first "big case," and so patiently and exhaustively did he master its prosaic details that he was vic torious at every point. For his services in this litigation he received a fee of thirty-six hundred dollars, a windfall for a young law yer in his early twenties. By 1877, when Parker was twenty-six, he had already made his talents and energy so well known in Ulster County that he was asked to take the Democratic nomination for Surrogate. He was in the minority party, and the Democratic ticket went down in de feat; but so remarkably large was the vote for Parker that on election night the return for Surrogate was still in doubt. When the count was complete it was found that Parker alone had "pulled through." Except in the larger cities, the Surrogate is not debarred from the practice of his profession. In 1883 Parker was reëlected. A word should be said about Judge Park er's political leadership at this time. Partly from the fairly even balance of political be lief, partly on account of New York's com manding influence in national politics, and partly, no doubt, from natural capacity and favorable environment, the country districts of New York have produced with fair regu
