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394 the Supreme Court to prescribe all rules of practice. Michigan must therefore change her Constitution before she can codify. Thomas Russell Sherwood, who was elected upon the resignation of Marston, was a Greenbacker, and came into the court in consequence of that fusion with the Democrats which lost the State to the Re publicans in 1882. He was born in Pleasant Valley, N. Y., March 28, 1827, and after his admission to the bar in 1851 practised for a year at Port Jervis. Then he came to Kal amazoo, a beautiful place which, with the di mensions of a city, maintained until within a few years a village organization, and claimed the distinction of being the biggest village known. Here he was twice the mu nicipal attorney, and in 1878 an unsuc cessful candidate for Congress. A man of generous proportions and of great vitality, he was celebrated at the bar for his apparently unlimited capacity for energetic work, which he would prolong when occasion demanded far into the night, to the great weariness of his associate counsel. Aggressive as an advocate, he was patient and kindly as a judge, and was well liked accordingly. By the close of his term political power in the State had again shifted, and he failed of reelection. It is one of the oddest of odd coincidences that when he entered the court room to take his seat for the first time upon the bench, court being already in session, the question in argument at the moment was the testamentary capacity of a Greenbacker.

This brings us to the present court, consisting of Chief-Justice Champlin and his associates Morse, Long, Grant, and Cahill. It may almost be called a military tribunal, for the puisne judges have all smelled powder, and two of them, Morse and Long, wear empty sleeves and have left their right arms on Southern fields. The Chief-Justice, to be sure, was not a soldier, but his brother Stephen was a Union general. When the court was somewhat different in its make-up, but after the crippled veterans had been elected, some irritated lawyer who had doubtless lost his case followed Judge Grover's advice to such persons the length of remarking rather bitterly that " the court now consisted of two lawyers, two one-armed soldiers, and another fellow." This came to the ears of Morse, who dryly observed that Long and he, at least, knew where to place themselves in such a classification.

John Wayne Champlin, like Judge Sherwood, is a native of Ulster County, N. Y. being born at Kingston, Feb. 17, 1831. He was a farmer's son, and had an academic education, beginning life as a civil engineer; he also studied medicine and has no small skill in surgery, so that the probability is that in his case, as well as in those of Judges Miller and Dillon, a good doctor was spoiled to make a chief-justice. It is not strange that with such a training he is accustomed to glut his taste for light reading with such giddy literature as the "Popular Science Monthly." He was admitted to the Bar of Grand Rapids in 1855; and in 1857 he drafted the charter of that city, which he has also served as recorder, city attorney, and mayor. He counts politically as a Democrat; but when he was urged to remove the Republican clerk of the court, he refused to do so, holding, as he once said, that "we are not political men here."

Allen Benton Morse, the first native Michigander to be chosen to the court, was born in Otisco, Jan. 7, 1839; and having been named for Fog-Horn Allen and Old Bullion, it will be correctly inferred that his father, John L. Morse, was a Democrat, — that is, he was until 1848, when he became a Barnburner, and so, naturally, in 1854, a Republican, which he still remains. He himself has held various minor judicial positions in Michigan, and also in Iowa, where he now lives. His son, the judge, was also a Republican to begin with; but he reversed his father's order of political evolution, being moved thereto, as he says, because he could not stand the San Domingo scheme. He took a partial course at the State Agricultural College, where he was accounted good