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THE GREEN BAG
bar. * * * It seemed scarcely possible to excel his skill in the examination of witnesses or of his addresses to the jury, but with these his ambition seemed satisfied; for arguments at the Term he was seldom well prepared and far less successful." Do you ever take down from the shelves the dingy volumes of Johnson or of Cowen, whose wretched law-calf binding comes off on your hands and your coat, and skim through the contents for the mere pleasure of it? It is like the study of the mastodon by the palaeontologist. If a man cites Johnson or Cowen now-a-days, his adversary is adamant and the judges talk among them selves about something contemporaneous. You might as well quote the Year Books, or refer to East or Hobart or Plowden. But there is in all the old reports abundant mate rial for delightful study. It may be that they are not what might be styled "light litera ture," but they are infinitely more suggestive, more stimulating to the imagination, and indeed more instructive than the one hun dred and odd volumes of New York Reports, or the latest volume of the Federal Reporter. You cannot fail to discover that there were giants in those days—giants at the bar and on the bench—and you may measure their stature. In those historic days, briefs were not prepared by clerks or opinions dictated to stenographers; counsel were not held down to hours or minutes; judges did not move uneasily in their seats and throw aside the records as a signal for the termination of an argument too prolix. The highest energies of the courts were not devoted to the question whether or not the cause was technically before them, and matters of large importance were accorded the full measure of consideration, as when the Court of Appeals gave an entire term to the case of Curtis v. Leavitt which involved $1,500,000 and devoted two-hundred and ninety-seven pages of the isth N. Y. to the statement and the opinions. I do not mean to be understood as presuming to utter a
word of criticism upon our courts of to-day or upon counsel of the present. The whole country and its business have grown so enormously that speed has come to be a necessity. The volume of litigation, the magnitude of amounts, has continually in creased, but the day is still but twenty-four hours long and it cannot be made longer by legislatures or even by Congress, not withstanding the Interstate Commerce clause of the Federal Constitution. If the stately and solemn lawyers or the grave and delib erate judges of the olden time could be brought in contact with the conditions of the present, they would gasp with breathless amazement, fly to their libraries, and perish from intellectual apoplexy. In those times the courts were almost as full of ejectment suits as they now are of suits to recover damages for personal injuries, those obstructers of the calendars and encouragers of fraud, perjury, champerty, and main tenance. The progress of the ages seems to make the world wither and the individual more and more, so that disputes about land have practically disappeared, and questions about personal injuries appear to have supplanted them, not to the benefit of the bar. We have become divided between real lawyers and ambulance lawyers. It is difficult to imagine Hoffman, Radcliff, Van Vechten.Van Buren, Livingston, Cady and Jordan contending over problems of con tributory negligence and the vagaries of guards and motor-men. An examination of the books reveals that at twenty-six, Van Buren was already argu ing cases in the Supreme Court and was either with the famous Williams or against him. Evidently he had made his mark, and friends and neighbors, whose judgment is usually sound, estimated him at his true worth. He asserts that he was extremely un willing to accept political office, but circum stances compelled him to become a candi date. In November, 1812, he took his seat as Senator from the Middle District and
