ing the vote of thanks, said that "thirty years ago he heard what he then thought to be the best speech he had ever listened to. He had that day heard another just as good; and on both occasions the speaker was Mr. Dudley Field. Mr. Field was the author of codes in his own State of New York, which had been adopted en bloc in several colonies, and which were represented in English law by the recent Judicature Act. It was very refreshing to hear Mr. Field, an American, speak as he had done, regarding the pestilent doctrines preached by Henry George. He heartily concurred in everything Mr. Field had said, and had much pleasure in seconding the vote of thanks."
Mr. Field has never been a politician nor an office seeker. He has held but one office besides that of codifier, — that of member of Congress, and that only for a part of one term. But he has always been a patriot, and unalterably opposed to human bondage and to oppression of the citizen by the Government. He was a Democrat, but an original "Free Soiler; " and at the Syracuse Democratic Convention, in 1847, he introduced the famous resolution known as the "Corner-Stone," announcing " uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery into territory now free, or which may be thereafter acquired." In 1856 and 1860 he acted with the Republicans. His patriotic labors during the civil war and during the draft riots led Mayor Opdyke to say of him, —
"To many eminent private citizens my acknowledgments are due for most valuable services; and to none more than to David Dudley Field, Esq., whose courage, energy, and vigilance were unsurpassed, and without abatement from the beginning to the end."
His later political course has been characterized by an independence born of conviction, and regardless of mere party ties and of criticism.
Mr. Field has this year published the third and concluding volume of his collected works, including addresses, essays, arguments, and various papers. He has always commanded an admirable style, clear, vigorous, and unconventional, and at the same time marked by peculiar elegance and culture, and evincing a keen eye to the beautiful, a correct ear for harmony, and a sharp sense of the humorous. These interesting volumes breathe of constitutional rights, of love of freedom, of promotion of peace and the amelioration of war, of patriotism, of law reform in States and between nations, of individual and public humanity, of judicial honor and integrity, of purity in politics and government, of a love of Nature and of literature, of a detestation of tobacco, of a contempt for our State, national, and town nomenclature, of reminiscence of men, places, and scenes.
Judged by the foregoing recital of his achievements, his most bitter opponents must concede that Mr. Field is the most famous and influential of living lawyers. It is not too much to say, in my judgment, that measured by what he has actually accomplished, he is the greatest law reformer of modern times, — greater than Brougham or Romilly, — and measured by what he has proposed, he is the boldest and most original of theorists after Bentham. I have good backing in this opinion, for a Lord Chancellor once said that " Mr. Field had done more for the reform of the law than any other man living; " and Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, Chancellor of the Exchequer, at a dinner given to Mr. Field, in London, by the members of the Law Amendment Society, as far back as 1851, paid to him the following unique tribute : —
"He trusted that his honorable friend, Mr. Field, would go down to posterity with this glory, — that he had not only essentially served one of the great est countries in the States of America, but that he had also provided a cheap and satisfactory code of law for every colony that bore the English name. Mr. Field, indeed, had not squared the circle; he had not found out any solid which answered to more than three denominations; he had not discovered any power more subtle than electricity,
