Stevens read law for some months with Judge Mattocks at Peacham. In the latter part of the same year he removed to York, Pennsylvania, where he pursued his legal stud ies, teaching at the same time in an academy for his maintenance. About this time the Bar of York County adopted a rule that no stu dent should be admitted to the practice of the court unless he had read, for at least one year previous to examination, exclusively in an attorney's office. If, as some authorities declare, this rule was intended to exclude an unknown and friendless stranger from the ranks of the profession, these legal aristocrats were far from gauging the calibre of the man they sought to suppress. Stevens went to Bel Air, Maryland, and having gained ad mission to the bar in 1816, he at once re turned to Pennsylvania, locating in Gettys burg, Adams County, a quiet country town, since become famous as the site of the desperate three days' encounter which formed the turning-point in the late Civil War. Here he opened a law-office and began the practice of his profession. It seems that he was not compelled to undergo that long period of initiatory inactivity which is the almost uni form experience of young attorneys without influential friends to push them to the front. He rose to prominence by the third of the four methods which Lord Campbell declared to be " the only way in which a young man could get at the bar; " namely, by quarter sessions. A case was on the trial list so desperate in its nature that the older lawyers were not disposed to defend the prisoner. As a last resort, Stevens was retained. He conducted the trial with such consummate ability, and his arguments were so clear, concise, and far-reaching, that his reputation was by this single effort established, his name was before the people, and he soon acquired a large and lucrative practice in the southern section of the State. But the comparative quiet of the legal profession did not afford the same scope for his restless and combative spirit which he saw awaiting him in the field of politics. He
entered that field at a time when the country was keenly alive to the merits of a statesman, when political opinions and beliefs formed no small proportion of the every-day thought and life of the people. Stevens was elected to the State Legislature in 1831, and con tinued a member of that body until 1840. with the exception, perhaps, of a single term. In that decade the Legislature was more prolific in the enactment of public laws and legal reforms than in any similar period of the history of the State. The revision and establishment of the intestate laws, of procedure in decedent estates, foreign and domestic attachment, road laws, and the provision of an Equity jurisdiction in the Court of Common Pleas, are a few of the public statutes then adopted, which remain to-day a part of the organic law of the Com monwealth of Pennsylvania. In 1834 an act was passed providing for the establishment of the Public School system of Pennsylvania. The following year a movement was set on foot by the demagogues of both parties to repeal the act. Their battle-cry was "in creased taxation," and they seemed to have a majority secured, when Stevens threw his whole strength and energy into the fight, and by a single oratorical effort whipped into line the wavering friends of free education, and established the principle that the State is in duty bound to provide for the education of all its inhabitants. Says a late Superin tendent of Public Instruction in Pennsylva nia: "Competent judges of all parties who witnessed the fight agree, that had he not stood firm as a rock, furnishing shelter and imparting strength to the free-school com batants, bidding defiance to the fiercest of those who would have struck them down, the law of 1834 would have been swept from the statute books, or have been saved only by a veto from the Governor, and the day of uni versal education in Pennsylvania might have been indefinitely postponed." Stevens him self always considered his speech on this occasion the most telling and effective of his life.
