Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/589

 James Grant, a Model American By Willis Bruce Dowd, of the New York City Bar BY whatever undeserved good for tune it was, I found myself in the year 1908 a director of the New York County Lawyers Association, of which Hon. John F. Dillon was Presi dent. From my membership in that board and that acquaintance I became pos sessed of the desire to look up particu larly the essential features of the life of the subject of this sketch. Then followed the intent to write the sketch and the act itself. It happened in this way: After a meeting of the board of directors of that Association, one day in the late winter of 1909, it so happened that Judge Dillon and I went uptown in the same car on the elevated road. We sat together, and presently he inquired of me whether he was correct in his infor mation that I was a native of North Carolina. I said, "Yes." Thereupon he commenced to run off the names of the great lawyers of that state with whose lives and works he was familiar; William Gaston and Chief Justice Ruffin, Judges of the Supreme Court, eliciting his most cordial approval. He was in a sort of half-abstracted reminiscence in alluding to these men, and lapsed into complete silence after he had finished speaking of them. Then in a few minutes he began talking again, as if he were giving me some informa tion for my own good. "I think I owe more of my success as a lawyer, whatever it may have been," he said, "to a native of North Carolina than I do to any other human being." "Who was that?" I inquired.^

"Judge James Grant of Iowa," said Judge Dillon with emphasis. "When I was a boy he was the most conspicu ous lawyer in my town, Davenport, if not in the whole state of Iowa, and, owing to my desire to become a lawyer, he urged me to make free use of his library, which I did. It was a large satisfactory library for those days, and I derived great benefit from my use of it. I am sure it was while I was read ing Judge Grant's books that I conceived the idea of writing my own book on 'Municipal Corporations,' which is now about to be issued from my hands in its fifth edition after the lapse of many years." It is well to observe that Judge Dillon was in his seventy-seventh year when he made this remark, and that he passed the seventy-sixth year of his career in more painstaking labor, especially on his book on corporations, than he had ever expended in any other year of his life. Now, it is doubtless to my shame that I had never heard of Judge Grant before, but it is true, and I said so. "Well, he was a greatman," said Judge Dillon; "a son of the state in which you and he were born, and a member of the profession to which you and I belong, he did at least one thing that, I suppose, no other lawyer ever did since the be ginning of the profession." "What was that?" I inquired. "It was this!" he said. "After the Civil War, when all his people in the South were impoverished to the point of starvation, he sent down there and offered to move his poor relations to the