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worked logically and directly. In addresses, he did not indulge in extraneous discussion or generalities; and platitudes never had charms for him." Indeed, the readers in this generation of Lincoln's pathetic plea for union to be found in his first inaugural, or of his great argument for fraternal pacification con tained in his Gettysburg oration, can well appreciate what an effective jury lawyer or arguer Abraham Lincoln must have been at the bar in a former generation. Judge Drummond, in summing up that bar career, ob served : " Lincoln could hardly be called very learned in his profession, but he never tried a cause without fully understanding the whole law applicable to it. I have no hesi tation in saying he was one of the ablest lawyers I ever knew." May it not be safe and just, therefore, to put on record that in the list of names of presidential lawyers, that of Abraham Lincoln, like Leigh Hunt's Aboti Ben Adhem, " led all the rest; " and as one to be likewise " written as one who loved his fellow men." Lincoln as a lawyer was appropriately fol lowed in the presidential succession by that notable sextette of bar veterans, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, Cleveland and Mc Kinley, all of whom the lawyers of this gen eration best know by their own experience or observation. Was it not on the eve of his nomination that General Garfield won the great legal renown, by his association with that American Justinian, David Dudley Field, in the Supreme Court case already adverted to? Before Arthur became the great political leader, which all parties acknowledge that he was, he had won legal fame in New Yorkcity as counsel for the poor Lcmmon slaves, and in obtaining, by suit at law, civil rights for the oppressed colored race long before the latter read the thirteenth and fifteenth constitutional amendments, and also as val uable counsel to a municipal taxation sys tem. The great law-firm which he founded and supervised, and to which he gave pres

tige, still exists in that city, with memorable traditions of his learning and skill. Grover Cleveland also founded two lawfirms memorable to the Buffalo bar; and as a young prosecutor of criminal pleas by pub lic appointment he attained a legal celebrity which beckoned him on to his many politi cal preferments of sheriff, mayor, governor and president. Moreover, he passed the re cess between his two terms as the head, in New York city, of another hard-working, painstaking and successful law-firm. President Harrison's laurels — won at the bar of Indiana and in the Supreme Court at Washington previously to his presidential career — have been again made greener and freshened by a new legal career during his recent retirement. And thus the catalogue of presidential lawyers ends, fit to be bound in embossed leather and labelled with golden letters. It is impossible for the lawyer re-perusing the inaugural addresses pronounced by each of those just enumerated not to detect, while reading those, the training of the bar. During his attendance at the Boston bar, John Adams had learned the concentration of language that has always been its marked character istic, so that his inaugural address contains only an hundred and forty — but pregnant — words. But it may be said that, in his ears and in those of the concourse whom he addressed, there still lingered echoes of the matchless Washington inaugural. Jefferson's inaugural is throughout pitched in that personally deprecatory key that " bar with his jury droop and eyeglass" — quoting herein Dickens — is, after the advice of rhet orician Seneca, in the traditional habit of using before a jury. In the main, Jefferson's inaugural reads as if a summing up of popu lar rights in a republic upon all the proofs of the two previous administrations. In his second inaugural he employed the adroit art of the advocate when he parried the assertion of opponents that he was atheistical. Madison's inaugural was substantial^ a