Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/138

 bench I delivered, in 1892, the annual address before the Law Academy upon the subject of “Pennsylvania Colonial Cases,” which I subsequently enlarged into a volume. Horace Binney, in his Leaders of the Old Bar, had ventured the assertion that prior to the time of William Lewis and the Revolution we could never learn anything of the manner of conducting the courts, and Peter McCall, in an address many years before, had regretted that the names of the only four lawyers in the province, whom Sprogell monopolized in his contest with Pastorius, had been lost. With much satisfaction, I gave reports of about sixty cases, between 1683 and 1703, and added the names of those four lawyers.

During my practice I had four students—Chester N. Farr, who became private secretary to Governors Hartranft and Hoyt; Stanley Williamson, who died young; William Righter Fisher, who had been a professor in Dickinson College and has since been a professor of law in Temple College; and Joseph Whitaker Thompson, now the United States District Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

When I came to the bar, Daniel Dougherty had the reputation of being its orator, but he was only an orator. He had a national reputation. Like so many other American orators, he was an Irishman. I have heard him likened to necessity because of the maxim that “necessity knows no law,” but that was an exaggeration of the truth and probably arose from the envy of some commentator less gifted. The first time he made a political speech he fainted and had to be carried from the platform. I once heard him make a powerful appeal to the jury, in an important case in which he was opposed by William W. Ker, who had only force and experience. When Ker arose he said quietly: “Gentlemen, you are to be congratulated. Those who generally hear Mr. Dougherty, listen for an hour at the Academy of Music and pay a dollar for the privilege. You have heard 128