Page:Bench and bar of Colorado - 1917.djvu/13



HE life, services, and death of the ablest and best of the legal profession are ordinarily, and too often, left without any record more enduring than the recollection of his colleagues at the bar, or on the bench, than which nothing is more ephemeral. In other professions and callings the record of its foremost men is written in such ways and characters as serve to attract the attention of the masses, and make him temporarily, or for all time, seen and known of men. For the military hero the whole world is making and inscribing a record, while the government which he has served feels bound to honor his memory with monuments of brass or marble that transmit his name and deeds to posterity. The artist leaves the creation of his genius in lines and colors that hand down his name and genius to remote generations. The minister speaks from year to year—now before some great assembly of laymen, now before synod, presbytery or conference, and the measured utterances that befit the occasion are as surely and correctly taken and reduced to print as they are heard by his auditors. The physician, whether as a specialist or a general practitioner, by years of study, experience and ability, becomes an authority, and the record of his experience and his dissertations fill the pages of the medical journals, and his name and fame exist in records more enduring than brass. The statesman, whether real or fancied—provided only that he holds a place supposed to belong to statesmen—leaves a record, not alone in the legislative journals, but also in the memory of ten thousand partisan admirers, and on the pages of a thousand newspapers, whose columns will be filled with the record of his life and exaggerated accounts of his deeds, from the day of his birth to that of his death.

Not so with the lawyer who, during a life longer or shorter, has been "only a lawyer." His achievements and