Chapter X

HORACE GREELEY once said that the only good use a lawyer could be put to was hanging. And a great many other sensible people entertain the same opinion. There may be cause for condemning the course of certain practitioners of the law, but the sam e may be said of men within the ranks of all the professions. Such men should not be criticized as lawyers, doctors, or the like, but rather, as individuals who seek, through a profession that is quite as essential to the welfare of the body politic as t he science of medicine is to that of the physical well being, or theology to the perfection of the moral nature, to carry out their nefarious and dishonest designs, which are usually for the rapid accumulation of money, although, at times, for more evil a nd sinister purposes, and which are the instincts of naturally depraved and vicious natures.

None of the professions stand alone in being thus afflicted. All suffer alike. The most holy and sacred offices have been prostituted to base uses. And it would be quite as reasonable to hold the entire medical fraternity in contempt for the malpractic e and quackery of some of its unscrupulous members, or the church, with its thousands of sincere and noble teachers and followers, in derision for the hypocrisy and deceit of the few, who simply use it as a cloak to conceal the intentions of a rotten hear t and a corrupt nature, as to saddle upon a profession as great as either the short-comings of some of its individual members.

By a wise ordination of providence law and order govern everything in the vast and complex system of the universe. Law is everything; lawyers nothing. Law would still exist, though every one of its professors and teachers should perish from the face of the earth. And should such a thing occur, and a new race spring up, the first instinctive desire of its best men would be to bring order out of chaos by the enactment and promulgation of wise and beneficent laws. Law in the abstract is as much a compone nt part of our planet as are the elements earth, air, fire and water; in a concrete sense, as applied to the government of races, nations, and peoples it plays almost an equally important part. Indeed, so grand is the science and so noble are the objects sought to be accomplished through it, that it has inspired some of the best and greatest men of ancient and modern times to an investigation and study of its principles. And in the long line of great names handed down to us from the dim and shadowy porta ls of the past, quite as many good men will be found enrolled as members of the legal profession as in any of the others, and owe their greatness to a sound knowledge of the principles of the law and a strict and impartial application of them. Draco, amo ng the first and greatest of the Athenian lawgivers, was hailed as the deliverer of those people, because of his enacting laws, and enforcing them, for the prevention of vice and crime, and looking to the protection of the masses from oppression and lawle ssness. It is true that many of the penalties he attached to the violation of the law were severe and even barbarous, but this severity proceeded from an honorable nature, with an earnest desire to improve the condition of his fellow-men. Triptolemus, h is contemporary, proclaimed as laws, "Honor your parents, worship the gods, hurt not animals." Solon, perhaps the wisest and greatest of them all, a man of remarkable purity of life and noble impulses, whose moral character was so great and conviction as to the public good so strong, that he could and did refuse supreme and despotic power when thrust upon him, and thus replied to the sneers of his friends:

Nor wisdom's palm, nor deep-laid policy,
Can Solon boast. For when its noblest blessings
Heaven poured into his lap, he spurned them from him.
Where was his sense and spirit, when enclosed
He found the choicest prey, nor deigned to draw it?
Who to command fair Athens but one day
Would not himself, with all his race, have fallen
Contented on the morrow?

Among the revered of modern nations will be found, conspicuous for their great services to their fellows, innumerable lawyers. To the Frenchman the mention of the names of Trouchet, Le Brun, Portalis, Roederer, Thibaudeau, and others excites a thrill of pride for their greatness and of gratitude for their goodness.

What Englishman, or American either, but that takes just pride in the splendid reputation and character of the long line of England's loyal, lawyer sons? The Bacons, father and son, who, with Lord Burleigh, were selected by England's greatest Queen to ad minister the affairs of state, and Somers and Hardwicke, Cowper and Dunning, Elden, Blackstone, Coke, Stowell, and Curran, who, with all the boldness of a giant and eloquence of Demosthenes, struck such vigorous blows against kingly tyranny and oppression ; and Erskine and Mansfield and a score of others. These are the men that form the criterion by which the profession should be judged. And in our own country have we not names among the dead as sacred, and among the living as dear? In the bright pages of the history of a country, founded for the sole benefit of the people, and all kinds of people, who more than our lawyers are recorded as assisting in its formation, preservation, and working for its perpetuity. And among the best and truest sons of ou r own State, and the good counties of Shelby and Moultrie, are their lawyers, men who are capable of feeling and uttering such divine sentiments, as "With charity for all; with malice towards none."