Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/805

 i20. VEEDER: A CENTURY OF JUDICATURE 791 his constitutional diffidence was so great that he deemed himself fitted only for chamber practice. He soon gained confidence in his powers, however, and at an early age be- came the acknowledged leader of the chancery bar. Al- though his professional labors were confined almost entirely to equity cases, he argued many Scotch and ecclesiastical appeals with marked ability ; and on the rare occasions when he appeared before a jury — such as the Windham lunacy case, and the Alexandra case, arising out of our Civil War — he displayed, as if by intuition, the most consummate powers of popular advocacy. In public life, too, he dis- played a capacity for statesmanship which few great law- yers have possessed. He was not only " great in council," as Disraeli said, but, next to the Prime Minister himself, he was the ablest orator of the Conservative party. Almost alone among great lawyers, he seems to have had a strong apprehension of the class of considerations which determine party policy and influence public opinion. Legal distinc- tions, it has often been pointed out, are so specific in kind that they seem to incapacitate ordinary minds for the appre- hension of moral and political distinctions. Distinguished lawyers in public life are apt to become either so merged in mere party advocacy that they cease, like Westbury, to exhibit individual character and conviction, or, like Selborne, when once they leave the firm ground of legal principle, they lean toward extreme views on either side from sheer want of apprehension of the intermediate resting places of political thought. But Cairns' public speeches are replete with inde- pendent political thought and strong personal conviction, and his sagacity is as keen and his logic as close on subjects of purely political interest as on legal topics. In manner, both at the bar and in public life, he was Scotch rather than Irish, logical rather than emotional. His great speech on the Reform Bill of 1867 was described by one of his oppo- nents as " frozen oratory ; " " It flows like the water from a glacier ; or rather it does not flow at all, for though Cairns never hesitates or recalls a phrase, he can scarcely be called a fluent speaker. His words rather drop with monotonous and inexorable precision than run on in a continuous stream.