Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/295

 258

guided the English-speaking people out of barbarism. The ancient foundations of our law are more apt to be dug up piecemeal and used in the erection of a new edifice, un scientifically constructed by a modern legis lature. The beauty and symmetry of the old structure will be lost, as were those of the Greek temples, whose walls were pulled down to build shepherds' huts. It is useless to stem the tide. One voice crying in the wilderness cannot and will not be heard. But I venture to point out that in this amorphous state of the law it is impossi ble to produce a great judge, a great legal administrator. It is not a time of building up, but of pulling down. A John Marshall would have no work to do. It is not a time of development along well-recognized lines, having their ends firmly fixed in great prin ciples. A Chief Justice Taney or a Joseph Story would be an incongruity. "The one judge, who, to those few who admire and cling to the older order, stands to-day pre eminent and alone, is a glorious survival of that greater time, adorning his court with his learning, respected by all. Yet his repu tation has not increased with increasing years and achievement, as it would have done three generations ago. It was this tendency of the law that made possible the appointment, in 1874, of Mor rison Remick Waite to the Chief Justiceship of the United States. He was a man of mediocre ability and attainments, who had never argued a case before the august tribu nal over which he was called to preside, of no especial learning, but of a plodding tem perament and unimpeachable honesty, of kindly heart and sensible head. He came of a family of lawyers, and was born at Lyme, Conn., in the house of his forefathers, on November 29, 18 16. No biography of him has ever been printed. What little is now to be learned of his life must be gathered

for the most part from numerous short and anonymous obituary articles, filled with in discreet and indiscriminate laudation, and from the forty-one volumes of the United States reports, 19 Wallace to 126 U. S., in clusive, in which are recorded his judicial opinions. Nothing is known of his boyhood. He was prepared at Bacon Academy, Col chester, Conn., for Yale, where he graduated in 1837, at the age of twenty-one, which at that time was at least two years beyond the average. William M. Evarts, Professor Ben jamin Silliman and Samuel J. Tilden were among his classmates. Upon graduating he read law with his father, who, in 1834, had been appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and in 1854 was translated to the Chief Justiceship of that State. One obituary notice that I have seen says that the young law student "traveled extensively" during the year that he was reading law with his father. Whither his journeys took him is not related. In October, 1838, seized with the western fever, he went to Maumee City, Ohio, largely influenced no doubt by his uncle, Horace Waite, who had settled there in 1836. When the future Chief Justice reached Maumee the community had been rudely awakened from its golden dreams by the panic of 1837. The paper cities, so carefully laid out, were ruined. Broken credit and land poverty gripped the inhabitants in hardship. He entered the law office of Samuel M. Young, with whom, upon being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1839, he formed a partnership, which lasted until Mr. Young's retirement from practice in 1856. The wrecked state of credit and finance, the forecfosure of mortgages and the settling of bankrupt estates early made Mr. Waite conversant with land titles, the law relating to mortgages and negotiable paper, and gave him a peculiar facility in going through and understanding compli