Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/71

45 PRACTICE OF LAW IN NEW YORK CITY. 45 this person is seeking a salary again. Clients seem to incline against one who has for years persisted in drowning himself in a tumbler. They like those who try for themselves young. A short term of service in the office of a busy practitioner is no doubt useful ; but, taking the bar as a whole, the largest percentage of cases in which a fair success has been made is of those who strive early in life for professional identity. "To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the lap of luxury," Franklin as- serts. This no doubt means when the chief resource is youth. The student just leaving the law school may guess from such commonplace existing circumstances as have been here set forth how widely our local practice of law differs from his school duties of evolving the eternal verities out of printed statements of fact in selected cases under the kindly guidance of a professor. Such student will quickly foresee how he must soon face the dilemma, "Shall I be intrinsically the lawyer (like Lord Mansfield) at the risk of only fifteen hundred dollars a year, or shall I refuse to quar- rel with my bread and butter, and make my success conspicuous by unlimited. creature comforts? " This question each man must settle for himself. Those who decide in favor of bread and butter uniformly shift upon fate all responsibility for their choice. Any law school worthy the name develops in her sons an in- capacity to choose any but the lawyer's side of this dilemma, and in that alone inclines men to the ways of pleasantness and peace. This article is not pessimistic, but it does not favor the so-called new but really destructive methods. The lawyer, thoroughbred and conservative, who seeks to find the facts as they are immutable and apply to them frankly the law as it is, who avoids the mere- tricious risk and incidents of public trial, still exists. The amount of good such lawyers do, unheard of, is enormous. The service such a lawyer renders his client is of great intrinsic value ; it is suitably rewarded. The relation of attorney and client in this light, and not as a conspiracy to do all that self-interest may prompt, and which by defect of laws is not yet a state-prison offence, may still be found, and merits all that has been elo- quently said of it. The careers of the present leaders of our bar teach nothing with greater certainty than that " Fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain." Thomas Fenton Taylor.