the greatest interests were intrusted to his management and advocacy. It is probable that in the busiest days of his practice, more millions in litigation depended on him than on any of his contemporaries. All that pro found learning, exhaustless research, indomi table will, undaunted courage, broad sagacity, and unequalled foresight, combined with tact, energy, power, fertility, and originality, could accomplish for a cause, was always at the service of his clients. Other men — his contemporaries, his predecessors, or his suc cessors — may have equalled him in some one or more of these qualities; but I think it is not too much to say that in this combina tion he had no peer at the New York Bar. He was not an O'Connor, he was not a Brady, he was not a Noyes, he was not an Evarts; but he had something of all, and enough more of his own to render him a unique and formidable power in the courts, and an almost unequalled manager of a gen eral law business of the largest kind. In one particular, at least, I should infer, from what I have heard and know of him, he was su perior to any man with whom he came in contact; and that was his foresight, com prehensive and unerring, which looked through the tangled maze of the most in tricate business, and provided for every contingency. By his independence and fearlessness at the bar, Mr. Field made many enemies among lawyers, and encountered bitter blame from the public This was especially marked in the so-called " Erie Litigations," in which he was accused of having developed the re sources of the writ of injunction to an ex tent theretofore unpractised. But he simply availed himself, for the benefit of his clients, of the existing remedies, with unshrinking boldness, and not to a greater extent than had been before and has since been done in some important instances. It is quite probable that if any of his professional maligners had stood in his place and had pos sessed his brains, they would have done the same things. It is a noteworthy fact that
in his subsequent capacity of codifier, and in his public utterances on the subject, while always justifying his course as a practitioner, he has deprecated the facility with which injunctions can be and are granted, and re commended a statutory restriction in this regard, which has uniformly been defeated by the lawyers. Among the most prominent of the cele brated causes which Mr. Field has argued, may be mentioned, in the Court of Appeals, the Tweed case, involving the validity of" "cumulative sentences" for misdemeanors; and in the Supreme Court of the United States, the Milligan case in 1867, respect ing the constitutionality of military com missions for the trial of civilians in loyal States, where the courts were open, and in the undisturbed exercise of their jurisdiction; the McArdle case in 1868, respecting the constitutionality of the reconstruction acts; the Cruikshank case in 1875; and the Cummings and Garland cases, respecting the con stitutionality of the test oath. But Mr. Field's practice has been but an episode in his great and lengthened career. More than half a century ago he set himself seriously at the task of reforming the laws of his State and of the English world. His first utterance on the subject was a letter to Gulian C. Verplanck. Defeated in his at tempt at election to the Assembly in 1841, his first opportunity was the Constitutional Convention of 1846. He did not even suc ceed in becoming a member of that conven tion, but he made himself so effectually heard in it that the convention adopted the novel scheme of abolishing the distinction be tween courts of law and of equity, and com mon-law practice and pleading, and directed the appointment of commissioners to prepare codes. Then and there the embattled codifiers stood and fired the shot heard round the world. It was David Dudley Field who had the audacity and the wisdom to pull the first trigger. He was known to be so radical that at first he could not even get a place on the commission; but he was appointed be
