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THE GREEN BAG
successive years (1866-68) he played on the University eleven. His wicket keeping was superb, the finest in England. For three successive years he championed Oxford against Cambridge in racquets, and all this without detriment to his academic studies. He got his first class in "Nods." He was maxime accessit for the Hertford, the univer sity scholarship for Latin. He won the Ireland, the university scholarship for Greek, and the same year (1868) he took a first in the final classical school of Liters Humaniores, familiarly known as "Greats," and with all these blushing honours thick upon him, he united an independence of mind in the matter of chapel and lectures, and in the frank expression of his opinions, which, even in those undergraduate days, foreshadowed his maturer radicalism in the sphere of politics. Three years after taking his degree, in 1871, he was called to the Bar. The Cariere auverte au talcnte joined the Oxford Circuit under the auspices of Sir Henry James, now Lord James of Hereford, and began to climb that long hill which lies before every barrister — was there ever a longer? — on the summit of which "Fame's proud temple shines afar." Academic honours count for little at the English Bar. A repu tation as a long-distance runner, like the present Lord Chief Justice, or as a first-class oarsman, like the late Lord Justice Chitty, or as a crack cricketer and racquet player, like the present Lord Chancellor, go a great deal further than wranglerships or first classes as a recommendation with the dispensers of briefs, and "Bob Reid" undoubtedly owed some of his earliest appearances in court to solicitor admirers of his athletic prowess. But a beginning once made he soon showed that he had stuff in him which needed no adventitious aid from his Oxford triumphs in the "Schools" or at the wicket. He had, and has, what Lord Russell of Killowen described as the best qualification for success at the Bar, "clear-headed com mon sense." He was an able advocate, an
effective speaker, with a firm grasp of legal principle and great business capacity; and these qualities soon made his services appreciated in the commercial cases in which his practice has chiefly lain. In the middle seventies, says a writer in the Solicitor's Journal, the late Mr. Southgate, Q, C., the well-known leader in the Rollo Court, was briefed in a Scotch appeal on a question of Scotch trusts with Mr. Reid, then of five or six years' standing at the Common Law Bar, as his only junior. After a very long consultation Mr. Reid left, and Mr. Southgate's first words after his depar ture were, "That young man will be Lord Chancellor if he lives! " A somewhat similar story is told of Cairns. " That young man," said Lord Westbury to the solicitor, after a consultation with Cairns, then an obscure junior, "that young man will undoubtedly rise to the top of his profession." In both cases the prophecy was fulfilled. Perhaps the most notable incident in Sir Robert Reid's professional career — he was knighted on becoming Solicitor-General in 1904 — was the Venezuelan Arbitration; for his services in which he was, in 1899, created a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. But it has been in the House of Commons that Sir Robert Reid's interests have mainly centered. Lawyers, as a race, are eminently conservative: they have been so since the days of the "scribes." It is not merely that the law is sacrosanct in their eyes — that it ought to be in the eyes of all right-minded citizens — but that the letter of the law exercises over the mind of the lawyer a sort of spell. Habitual concentra tion on a microscopic examination of cases and sections, the details of the law's edifice, divert the lawyer's attention from the architectural whole, the larger lines of state policy. It is in this sense that "the letter killeth." A young Radical lawyer, with aspirations after this perfect state, and not merely ambitious to seat himself on the woolsack, gravitates inevitably to the House
