The Green Bag VOL. XVIII.
No. 2
BOSTON
FEBRUARY, 1905
THE LEGAL SIDE OF JOSEPH W. FOLK BY K. G. BELLAIRS
ONE of the brightest minds of the Mis souri bar asked to analyze the legal side of Joseph Wingate Folk, Governor of Missouri, famous because of his fight against corruption in office, replied : " He is above all else an Intnitionist; and with this quality he is the happy possessor of wonderful energy and a marble immobility of poise." This definition of the man whose name is almost a household word by reason of his success ful crusade against venality in public office, tells in few words the sort of man whom the boodlers had to face when he set his sin ews and started in to clean out the Augean stables of the Municipal Government in St. Louis and the State Government in Jeffer son City. The quality of any individual human being is of too fine an essence to be susceptible of accurate and scientific analysis. Every an alysis will be found to have been borrowed very largely from the analyst. This same baffling elusiveness is equally at hand when we mark out for analysis the more limited sphere of a man's business or professional activities. We can easily, like the cartoon ist, catch a few peculiarities or character istic habits; or we know that he has won this great case and lost that; we can guess with tolerable accuracy at his professional income, but the real man with the arc of his potentiality, cannot be measured, save by time and destiny. The law is one of the most difficult of modern callings. It requires a rare com bination of physical and mental energy. Your scholar who is happy in the library and in searching profoundly after the his
torically developed reasons of the law, is very seldom a keenly strenuous fellow who loves to mix with men, try hard-fought jury cases, handle headstrong clients, and take a lively interest in matters social and politi cal. Yet I venture to say that your real all-round good lawyer is pretty apt to be a judicious compound of these diverse na tures. In addition to these, or rather along with these, every successful lawyer has of course the peculiar aptitudes that deter mine for him the precise lines of his life work. Joseph W. Folk, while he could not be rated as a profound jurist, — he is too young for that, — nevertheless has the combina tion of mental and physical energy in a very high degree; and he is so happily poised that he can turn rapidly from one to the other, without any sense of confusion, and with a clear perception of the ultimate end. He can investigate with surprising rapidity the available authorities upon a legal proposition and form from them a clear and certain image of the law; and he is superlatively active, resourceful and per suasive, always dangerous, with an un canny and unerring faculty of finding and hammering the weak point in an adver sary's case. These are the characteristics of this foe to boodle, and to them he owes his advance within a space of three years, from a some what obscure practitioner of the civil law to one of the foremost prosecutors of criminal cases. The term " Intuitionist " is well ap plied to Joseph W. Folk, yet knowledge of the law was bred into him, for his father
