451
John Forrest Dillon well displayed in the introduction, where he says :— "My relation as editor of these vol umes came about in almost an acci
dental way. A distinguished Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Mr. Justice Shiras) concluded a letter acknowledging a copy of my Albany
address saying:
‘A collection of' the
addresses delivered on John Marshall
Day, if put in a permanent form, would, I think, be very interesting as showing a
concensus of opinion concerning Mar shall on the part of eminent lawyers in all parts of the country.’ Just after the receipt of the letter it chanced that I had occasion to write to the publishers of this work, and I inclosed the letter of
Iowa with an ambition, not unnatural,
to write a work upon some subject that I hoped might be useful to the profession. The first and indispensable requisite to such an undertaking was access to a full law library. Judge Grant's library in this city (one of the largest private law libraries in the country) supplied this
condition.
The
next
requisite,
equally indispensable, was the needed leisure for study and research, and the only time possible to a judge was in the intervals of uncertain length between
the learned Justice and asked them to
the terms of court.
undertake the publication, even though
at hand in my own city enabled me to
the enterprise might prove unprofitable. With characteristic liberality they acced
do what otherwise I could not have
ed to the proposal, annexing the single
from judicial labor by working in the Grant library, collecting material for my projected book. I selected my subject, ‘Municipal Corporations,’ and entered upon the work of thorough and systematic preparation. Without
condition that I should collect, arrange and edit the addresses, with a suitable
introduction. Having suggested that they should make any pecuniary sacri fice which the publication might involve, I felt estopped to make the objection, however well-founded, of want of time.
And so I consented.” But the pride of his heart, the literary i?
work which has given him the greatest
ii if
pleasure and satisfaction, is “Municipal
Corporations," which Mr. Justice Brad I
ley termed "a legal classic."
i l i b.
in time and labor is well told in his Davenport Library address, when he said: "Now it so chanced in the course of time that I found myself on the bench of the Supreme Court of the state of
This great
and imperishable treatise (for a classic cannot die) has but recently reached its fifth revision, and is now a work of five
volumes in which forty thousand cases
are cited and the whole law of the subject fully presented. The first edition was published in 1872 and is a one-vol ume work of about eight hundred pages, a large book when one considers that
it was prepared by the author without any aid whatever. What it cost him
The library being
done, that is, utilize the days snatched
the aid of stenographer or typewriter, and with no previous American treatise to guide me, I began an examination, one by one, of thousands of the law
reports, commencing with volume one of the State of Maine and continuing through successive reports in that state to date. In like manner the reports of every one of the states and of the feder
al and English courts were examined, occupying all my available time for about six years. The result of this research I have never had occasion to regret. The book was successful, and
it has profoundly affected my whole professional career." The development of the law in the past forty years has been such that it now requires a work of four thousand pages
