22O
THE GREEN BAG
Choate Stories. — Once, when he was defend- I ing a suit against a large corporation, the plaintiff's counsel, a well known New York lawyer, raked Mr. Choate 's clients fore and aft in the good old-fashioned style of invective, denouncing them as " vampires, monsters that feed on the blood of the people," and so forth. The jury was evidently impressed, and the orator, after a final broadside -from his. heaviest batteries, sat down in triumph. Mr. Choate had been leaning back at ease in his chair with his hands in his pockets. He rose to reply with a. pleasant smile upon his hand some face: "Gentlemen of the jury," he said in quiet tones, " do you know what a vampire really is? Look at the Quaker gentleman who is the president of the defendant company —- sitting there with a gray suit and a white neckcloth. Look at the seemingly inoffensive young man sitting beside him — his secretary. You thought vampires were something terrible when Brother Parsons described them; but can it be so? For these gentlemen are vampires!" The effect of the opposing lawyer's pon derous artillery was undone. Yet Mr. Choate could say very cutting things in his suave and courteous way. He once commended a candidate for a judicial nomination as " a capable young man, a very capable young man. In his fourteen-year term he will learn enough to be a judge." He was making the closing speech in an important case before the state supreme court when the judge wheeled round in his chair and began to talk to a friend. The lawyer ceased speaking. The justice, noticing the silence, looked inquiringly at him. "Your honor," said Choate, " I have just 40 minutes in which to make my final argu ment. I shall not only need every second of that time to do it justice, but I shall also need your undivided attention." The undivided attention was secured. The stories told of Mr. Choate are countless. Here is one of his best, a typical flash of his epigrammatic philosophy:
Some one asked him who he would choose to be, if he were not Joseph H. Choate. "Mrs. Choate's second husband," was the instantaneous reply. The same fine courtesy, which is character istic of the man, showed in the sentence with which he began a speech at a public dinner, when he glanced at the gallery above him and saw that it was full of ladies. "Now," he said, " I understand the mean ing of the scriptural phrase, ' Thou madest man a little lower than the angels.' ' Choate's wit has been a fatal bar to his success as a party man asking for votes. An after-dinner speech which made him thousands of enemies in the lower wards was the one in which he defended the citizens of New York against the a'ccusation of having the worst government on earth. "It is most unfair to charge the citizens of New York with any complicity in this matter," he protested. " The citizens of New York are the only persons in the city who have absolutely nothing to do with its government; it's the citizens of foreign countries who run that." This witticism brought down the house. It also brought down upon its author's head the wrath of every man %vith a foreign name who was holding a place of trust or profit in the city government, from the mayor then n office to the gate-keepers of the parks. On another occasion, at a New England society dinner, where all the great men assem bled were lauding the Pilgrim fathers to the skies for their stern piety and rectitude of con duct, Mr. Choate struck a discordant note by remarking that, for his part, he thought the Pilgrim mothers were the persons who deserved most and received least of the plaudits of posterity. "For gentlemen," said he, " they had to endure not only the privations, and the climate, and the terrors of Indiarl warfare, but the society of the Pilgrim fathers besides, who, from all that has been said about them here tonight, must have been the most insufferable prigs in the world."
