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Marshall chose the two courses above named; he must have been one of the very first to avail himself of this new privilege. He remained only one term. Jn view of what was to happen by and by, it is interesting to observe that his opportunity for an edu cation in law came, thus, through the agency of Thomas Jefferson. The records of the Phi Beta Kappa Sociebat William and Mary College, where that now famous society had originated less than a year and a half before, show that on the iSth'of May, 1780, "Captain John Marshall, being recommended as a gentleman who would make a worthy member of the society, was balloted for and received;" and three days later he was appointed, with others, "to declaim the question whether any form of government is more favorable to public vir tue than a Commonwealth." Bushrod Wash ington and other well-known names are found among his associates in this chapter, which has been well called "an admirable nursery of patriots and statesmen."1 The first American institution of learning to offer university courses in municipal law and the law of nations was the College of William and Mary. They were introduced there by Jefferson, when Governor of Vir ginia, in 1779, and Marshall was a member of the first class that took them up. (Papers of the Am. Hist. Ass., IV, 133.) He was not a college graduate. At eighteen he began his law studies with the education of a Virginia schoolboy. He could read Latin; he knew something of French; he knew much of the best literature of Eng land. There are American law schools to day, and I am glad that Yale is not one of them, where, if such a youth were to seek admission, he would find the doors barred against him. But Marshall had that in him which no 1 Professor James Bradley Thayer, of the Law School of Harvard University. A •' J.ife of John Marshall," by Professor Thayer, is in press, to be published shortly by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, in their Riverside Bio graphical Series.

liberal education can supply. It is the native faculty, God-given and self-helped, that makes the man. A college may polish it, quicken it, elevate it; but all of education is to bring out, to lead forth what is already in him. "We receive but what we give." Marshall entered upon university studies at twenty-four, with a mind undisciplined by college training, well disciplined by selfformed habits of patient reading and quiet thought. By the camp fires of the Revolu tion, in the watches of the night, he had thought on great themes and joined in high resolves. To such a man, as Wythe ex pounded the laws of nature and of nations, the great opportunities of American life, under free representative government, must have loomed up with a new dignity. Jefferson was no friend of Marshall, and yet he was his best friend. He gave him what he lacked. His overthrow of the old curriculum of William and Mary, and intro duction of a chair of laws opened for the young soldier the door to legal learning. It was Jefferson who made possible Marshall's great career.1 AT THE BAR.

He was fortunate in beginning the prac tice of his profession at the close of the war. Long absences from home and the conse quent neglect of property and business, the complications and confusion resulting from the political and social changes brought about by the Revolution, proved fertile sources of litigation. Marshall, from the first, had a large practice and rose so rapidly in his profession that before he reached the age of thirty he was the acknowledged head of the bar of his State, and Virginia at that time, in wealth and population and in the calibre of her great men, was surpassed by none of her sister States. Many of the cases which arose in that critical period presented novel and difficult 1 Honorable Simeon E. Baldwin, Justice of the Supreme Court of Connecticut.