Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/94

 The

Vol. XIX.

No. 2

Green

BOSTON

MR. JUSTICE

Bag

February, 1907

MOODY

By Hon. Herbert Parker WHEN William H. Moody accepted a nomination as member of the Fifty fourth Congress, mingled with an unani mous sentiment of confidence in the excel lent public service he would surely render to his country, there was an often expressed regret that the Bar of Massachusetts was to lose an advocate and lawyer, already marked as of conspicuous ability and of constantly growing power and influence. Essex County, of preeminent fame in our jurisprudence because of the distinguished judges and lawyers she has given to the state, had produced no son, who, in promise and actual accomplishment, was held in greater respect or higher repute, either in the community or in the courts of justice. That Mr. Moody himself deplored the prospective interruption of his professional work, and his retirement from interests upon which his mind and heart were alike concen trated, is well known to those friends with whom he spoke freely. Modest as he was, and is, in his estimate of himself, thinking only of the joy in the completion of one ser vice, as he passed to like accomplishment of the next, he never stayed to contemplate his own attainments, or to give even the briefest pause for self-commendation; yet he could not have been unconscious of the extraordi nary and deserved professional success he had secured. He was advised of it by the verdicts of juries in almost daily trials; it was declared to him by the rescripts of the Su preme Court, again and again, affirming the conclusions of his legal sagacity, and of his compelling force in presentation and argu ment of propositions sustained by his wide

research in the law, and made, often for the first time, applicable to some new phase of litigation, or to the establishment of some important property or personal right. He was called, by his election to Congress, to a wholly new and untried field of duty. He realized that he was leaving associations very dear to him, and, for a time at least, lay ing aside congenial labors which had excited and engaged his earnest and exclusive effort. To many of us he said in going, that it was but for a brief time, and he consoled himself for what he spoke of as a sort of exile, by the thought of his early return to his profes sional work, which he assured us was the sole ambition and desire of his life. We saw better than he then did that he must inevitably become such an active and vital part of the administration of national affairs, and be so compelled to have respon sible participation in their progress as to for bid his withdrawal, even if he would. The event was inevitable; his constituents would not permit him to surrender their commis sion, nor could he abandon great causes, which he had undertaken, to the defeat which must have been sustained without his tireless, powerful, and constant support. His tenure in office as Representative in Congress had not run its course before he was called to undertake the administration of the world -encircling duties of Secretary of the Navy; from thence he was summoned to assume the enormous and exacting responsi bilities of the office of Attorney-General of the United States; from thence, at last, to take the oath of highest service and most exalted authority that citizen can ever as