Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/176

 152 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

infinitum. If they are assigned, then, in general, parties get the opinion of one man instead of the opinion of the whole court.

For years the supreme court of the United States has been three years be- hind its docket, and the business has been constantly increasing, notwithstand- ing Congress has doubled the jurisdictional test so that in general no one can get there from the Federal courts unless the value of the matter in dispute ex- ceeds five thousand dollars.

There is one practical remedy so far as the court is concerned, and that is to increase the valuation test until nobody but Jay Gould, Vanderbilt and their fellow billionaires can go there, making it what it is fast becoming, a tribunal before which none but the rich can be heard. When that hour comes, if it ever does, the court will be the titled and gilded prostitute of the gigantic moneyed interests of the country, and will make such decrees as its owners desire. When we reach that place we shall have no need of courts.

Some eminent members of the profession, admitting these evils in their full- est extent, think the only remedy a congeries of appellate courts subordinate to the suj/reme court.

The result necessarily must be that we should have from ten to twenty-five supreme courts besides the one at Washington. Suitors unless rich would have to roll the rock of Sisaphus through the tribunals named without reach- ing at last the one which alone could establish a uniform rule. Those inferior supreme courts would be sure to disagree as to the law, and establish different rules of practice, partaking of the character of all types from that of Arizona to New Hampshire, and thus establishing a veritable Babel in practice.

These evils will be felt to a much more marked extent in a few years than at present.

The practical question for you to consider is what course shall be pursued by you, and the answer from the lesson is a ready one. You must follow the course so common in the mother country — become specialists — or you must become masters of the law and practice in the state where you intend to live, and, except in a general sense, pay no attention to anything outside of it.

Special practice developes acuteness as a general propersition at the ex- pense of strength, or as Coleridge put it, " sharpens the intellect as a grind- stone does a knife, by narrowing the blade." As a rule no man can, at present, afford to follow a specialty in New Hampshire and a large share of the States in this union. In New York and some of the other large cities he may. Some make a specialty of patents, others of commercial law, others of admiralty, others conveyancing, others real estate, others divorce, and others of equity practice ; while some confine themselves to practice even within specialties to particular courts. But the only alternative for a New Hampshire lawyer is to become a master of the jurisprudence of his own state ; and this is all any one man ever ought to be asked to do.

Practice is a very elastic term. India-rubber bears no comparison to it. At sometimes, in the same jurisdiction, it means much, at others little. In a general and enlarged sense it means every step taken by a lawyer from the first consultation with his client in his office, until he pays him over the funds which are the fruits of his judgment, and takes his receipt therefor.

In a more familiar sense it is getting the use of the tools of the trade, as an engineer does of the machinery of his engine — the practical as compared with theoretical knowledge.

At an early day in the mother country there were no pleadings — nothing in writing — and the practice ment the entire conduct of a cause after it was fairly in court.

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