6O2
THE GREEN BAG
Century upon the professional career of Abraham Lincoln, that, when he came to the presidency, he surrendered a railroad corporation practice perhaps the most im portant of any in Illinois. Seward was a distinguished lawyer, as was his contempo rary, Franklin Pierce, and as Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Silas Wright of New York, and your own Levi Woodbury had been before him. The Adamses and Jefferson of a still earlier day were lawyers until public duties occupied their entire time. Even General Jackson had been a successful lawyer and a judge upon the frontier before he was famous as a soldier. Anyone who carefully studies Jackson's life, especially in light of his most interesting autographic correspondence with Martin Van Buren recently acquired by the Department of Manuscripts in the Congres sional Library at Washington, will find, and perhaps to his surprise, that Jackson never lost the traits and instinct of the lawyer. Samuel J. Tilden was one of the first, prob ably the very first, of American corporation lawyers at the time that he was candidate for the presidency, and, as some of us think, elected to it. He was at any rate one of the first of America's statesmen. Mr. Cleve land, when he gave up the private earning of money upon his election to the gover norship of New York, held an honorable and successful place as a lawyer, and espe cially a corporation lawyer, at Buffalo. Mr. Harrison, twice his competitor for the presi dency, held a like and even more distin guished professional place in Indiana. And so I might go on. These men filled great places — Mr. Cleveland still fills such a place — in American public life. Dispar agements of the legal profession, some of them jocose and most of them tolerably frivolous, were as common in those days as now. But the conception that a lawyer was dedicated for life or his career to the interests of any client, however important, or any set of clients, however important, was not known. It was then and very sensibly supposed that the same rigorous
rule of honor to which the lawyer must be subject when he represents a private client must and would dominate a lawyer of char acter fit to a high place, if he were to come to represent any public interest. His very loyalty to lesser clients would assure his supreme loyalty to the city, the state, or the nation, if it were to become his client. With the enormous growth of business of corpora tions, and especially of railroad, banking, and industrial corporations, the professional work done for them by lawyers has, of course, enormously increased. And it is with this growth, and partly because of it, that there has arisen this disparagement of the lawyer in his relations to public affairs. In large measure the disparagement has been ignorant; but it has been none the less seri ous. Many of our latter day leaders in public life have never been active, practicing lawyers. President Roosevelt, who leads the Republican party, served a very brief apprenticeship as a lawyer, but he never practiced law, and his faculties and achieve ments, whether they be praised or criticised, are not those of a lawyer. So with Mr. Bryan, who leads the Democratic party, and who also served an apprenticeship as a lawyer, but who did not as a lawyer make any part of his present repute. If we think of his profession as other than that of a politician or statesman we think of journal ism. Indeed it is now sometimes doubtful whether the inheritance of great fortune is not, for the American people as it is for the English people, a better equipment for great public station than the training of a lawyer. The rail-splitter or the tow-path boy is not the only ideal young statesman. The for tunes, for instance, which President Roose velt and Mayor Low of New York City inherited and which enabled them to dedi cate their entire time and energy to public service from youth, have, I think, been agreeable to the American people. Mr. Hearst is certainly a powerful factor in pres ent day politics; and his great fortune and
