MARTIN VAN BUREN Kinderhook," and he was for one year a student in the New York office of William P. Van Ness, afterwards United States District Judge. Van Ness was only four years the senior of his student and, accord ing to Hammond, the historian of early New York politics, he was "one of the most shrewd and sagacious men that the State of New York ever produced." I am not pre pared to say that every lawyer should have a college training, but the conditions to-day are not the same as those of 1802. Colleges then were materially different from the colleges and universities of to-day. I doubt if Van Buren would have been any more or less successful if he had been a college man. As to a clerkship in an office in New York City, I am convinced that it helped him. We city men recognize the fact that the country lawyer is usually better founded in the principles than the busy men of the metropolis who are compelled to concern themselves more about the doing of a thing than about the technicalities of the per formance. The magnates of finance in New York City care very little about the niceties of the law; they want to achieve results. In 1802 there was not so much difference be tween the legal business of the city and that of the country; but yet I think the year's work in New York was of advantage to Van Buren, although he says himself that Van Ness did not have much business. He was licensed as an attorney in No vember, 1803, and opened an office in his native village in association with his halfbrother, James I. Van Alen. At the next term of the county courts he was admitted as attorney and counsellor, and in February 1807, he reached the ultimate stage of professional standing, the office of Coun sellor in the Supreme Court. In those days they were fond of fine distinctions in the grades of lawyers; they had not learned that the lawyer finds his level by the force of his intellect rather than by the title which he bears. In 1808 he was appointed Surro gate of Columbia County and served until
1813. In 1809 he removed to Hudson and became a partner of Cornelius Miller, the father of Judge Theodore Miller whom most of us remember as a Judge of the Court of Appeals. It is perhaps almost undignified to refer to the fact that Van Buren and Miller did what is called a "paying business." It is very pleasant to think of our profession only in its loftier aspects, but we cannot deny that there is a financial element about it which is not devoid of serious interest. The question of pay cannot be overlooked; and it is no mean test of the ability of the men who try and argue causes, this test of the sums which clients are willing to pay for their services. At the age of forty-six he was compelled by the exigencies of public life to relinquish private practice. He had amassed what was at that time a com fortable fortune, acquired by faithful and distinguished professional labor. In the autobiography, he sums up his legal life thus: "For my business I was to a marked extent indebted to the public at large, having received but little from the mercantile interest or from corporations, and none from the great landed aristocracies of the country. It was notwithstanding fully equal to my desires and far beyond my most sanguine expectations. I was not worth a shilling when I commenced my professional career. I have never since owed a debt that I could not pay on demand nor known what it is to be without money, and I retired from the practice of my profession with means adequate to my own support and to leave to my children not large estates but as much as I think it for their advantage to receive." The bar of Columbia County has always been conspicuous for ability, but it was un usually brilliant in the early days of the nineteenth century. Jacob Rutsen Van Rensselaer, Ambrose Spencer, Thomas P. Grosvenor, William W. Van Ness,—who must not be confounded with Van Buren 's preceptor—and Elisha Williams made it famous all over the State, and indeed among lawyers all over the country. Those who
