Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/294

 The

Vol. XIV.

No. 6.

Green

BOSTON.

Bag.

June, 1902.

MORRISON REMICK WAITE. Bv Francis R. Joxes. UNLESS a lawyer is a politician or a genius the record of his life is bare of interest. The commonplace of petty detail and of ephemeral professional success does not stand the test of printer's ink. This is especially true of those lawyers whose career fell during the middle of the last century, before the accumulation and combination of capital made a successful attorney's life more picturesque, if not dramatic, by that test, which so appeals to the American mind, the munificent size of his fees. During those years the profession of the law was growing into a business. The old ideals were passing away. The old attributes and talents, with out which no man could have hoped for pro fessional preferment or a lucrative practice, became things of the past. Eloquence grew to be no longer prized. Profound learning became a handicap. The Year Books and deep reading in the science of the law became unessential. Business ability, common sense, took the place of a knowledge of the history and precedents of the common law and chancery. The science of jurisprudence be came academic. Its study was left to those whose love of its principles was too great to submit to the seduction of the ignorant helter-skelter into which the active practice of the law degenerated. Unscientific plead ing, corrupted by statute, did away with the necessity for, nay, the possibility of, a definite issue being joined. In sadness the learned watched these vanishings of a greater time,

while the world, scoffing, passed them by. The genius of the time, replete as it was with tremendous advancement in science and in vention, could not stop to work out the new problems which were presented to juris prudence. The impatient cry was, and still is, to sweep away all precedent, and to build anew from the foundation. If the science of jurisprudence is, as I conceive it to be, the application to human affairs of those princi ples of conduct which have been handed down and moulded through the years by the sages of the law, and which have been found by experience most conducive to right and justice, each new question being solved by the extension and development of the appro priate doctrine, the iconoclastic spirit of to-day may well be deprecated. To it is due the many and increasing conflicting decisions, the many and increasing dissents. It has been and still is a time of transition. The bases of the law are to-day unknown. It is difficult for a lawyer to predict with confi dence the decision by a modern court upon any point of law, however long that point has been settled, and however numerous the precedents. Undoubtedly in time order will come again out of this chaos. The founda tions and landmarks of our jurisprudence will cease to be obscured by shifting sands. The beacons of justice will again burn steadily in their appointed places. But it is questionable whether they will be the same beacons or the same landmarks that have