6
The Green Bag
departments of the law, is all well enough; but it is our reproach that so great a personality, a man so im measurably valuable, should, perhaps, be better understood and better appre ciated in the academic cloisters of Ger many, France, and Italy, than in our own country. He has labored constantly and consist ently for a jurisprudence of results. He has battled against form for its own sake. He is a Sabinian rather than a Proculian, but a Sabinian with sociologi cal rather than verbal allowances. He is giving a much-needed impulse to juristic analysis as the necessary founda tion for needed reforms in restating our burdensome corpus juris. He is in the foreground fighting for enlightened methods in the law of crimes and the punishment of criminals. He has used his influence, and successfully, too, against the perpetual programs for short-cuts in the law that lead away from legal advancement while seeking the straight line that exists nowhere out of mathematics. His deep knowl edge of legal institutions has not turned him away from the paths of a sound legal progression. But he is not a juridical revolutionist. He holds neither to the moral immobility of society of a Buckle nor to the social plasticity of a Montesquieu. He recognizes, as only the historian can, that society may not detach itself from the past. For him life is a stream, and the present is not an isolated point in time. He is insist ent that we shall know as much as we can about it before we begin to build dams and locks. If ever we are to have an epoch of scientific jurisprudence in this country, Mr. Wigmore will be regarded by the writer of its history as one of its founders. This much can be predicted with confidence, even though this full
life should now be cut off; but Mr. Wigmore is still a young man in years, in heart and mind, and from one who has always scattered with an open hand his wealth of intellect for the benefit of others, much may be expected. Like Kohler, Wigmore is not only a giant of activity, but he is a producer of great activity. He has a faculty of originat ing valuable ideas and creating the conditions to bring them to a full realization. He will be regarded as the father of our scientific jurisprudence not by the measure of lineal feet of his literary production, but rather by the powerful influence which he is exerting for scientific methods in the adminis tration of justice, in ways less known to the general public, but more effective than the mere written word. Coming now to consider this rare character in the purely personal aspect, that is to say, stripped of his universal learning and his unusual achievement, we again encounter the difficulty of approach. We may begin by quoting from a memorial to President Taft in which Mr. Wigmore was proposed as successor to the late Mr. Chief-Justice Fuller: "To know John H. Wigmore is to become a Wigmore enthusiast." He reminds one in many ways of Rudolf Stammler, who at the age of twenty-six became Dean of the Juridical Faculty of the Halle-Wittenberg University. It was said of Stammler, and the same exactly applies to Wigmore: "There are plenty of people who take life so very earnestly. But they often extend their earnestness to every department of life. Not so Stammler; he is one of the sunniest natures imaginable, full of delightful humor, a child among chil dren, and with a remarkable talent for friendship and good-fellowship." In truth, Mr. Wigmore in person might be mistaken for a modern cul
