28
The Courier Review.
Law is a deity in the light of whose smile springs homes and harvests, towns and trade, and all things good, but when her face is hidden these do reveal things all evil—and the times tend to prove that her face is hidden by a mask of gold as was hidden the face of the Indian god Teken. And I trust I shall be no pessimist if I say devotion to gain is the plague spot on our civilization. It ranges the whole scale. The preacher is called to the richer parish and the call may be as feeble as the whimper of a day old child and it will be heard if the salary be large enough. The doctor's devotion to the cause of science depends in no small measure upon the bank account of the subject under scientific consideration, and the lawyer's belief in his client's innocence is almost in exact proportion to the size of the fee. And these tendencies of the times stop not their steps at the threshold of the legislative hall. There arguments, more glittering than the most brilliant oratorical pyrotechnics, find an audience (usually an audience of one at a time) and which with no voice but a clink, prove more potent than the voice of reason or the voice of duty. The man who passes the Red sea of corruption that ebbs and flows at Washington and comes over dry shod, must be a veritable Moses indeed, but oftener called Dennis and rarely called Eli. But let us trust these tendencies carry within themselves their own cure. The laureate said, "the tyrants cruel glee forces on the freer hour," and lets us hope that very acuteness of the evil will the sooner rouse the people; and that the social reforms foretold by the Rev. Doctor Abbott are now, at this hour, grouping their way into the present out of the near future—that our nation will come to be not only the richest among nations but that its wealth will be distributed with such a degree of equality that the howl of the wolf of want will be but an echo of the past, that the laborer will have a fairer hire and that those anomalies in government, the giant corporations, with the power of princes and which recognize no more responsibility than a street gamin, that these creatures of the State will be controlled by their creator rather than without it. And this
work of rebuilding must be done largely by the lawyers.
May the work fall in the lot of those in whose brain wisdom is wedded to honor, for when such you find his mate as a workman is only to be found in a Hiram of Tyre; and in the Bar of America, needs it to be said by me, no larger grouping of this class of which I have just spoken can be found than in the portion of it known as the Kansas Bar—the bar graced by the presence of those lawyers who sitting silent at this board more potently represent it by their silence than I am able to do by much vain speaking.
The law in its purity is a divinity toward whom her lovers feel as does the devout Bramin kneeling at the shrine of Vishnu. She gives to those men who will seek after her with patient industry, nightly vigils and the cleanly living that steeps the mind with capabilities, to such she vouchsafes a reward compared with which the poor pleasures of the playhouse, the dead sea delights of the revel, the hush of summer days, or the bright eyes of women are as nothing. She has fitly been compared with the mystic lady who dwelt by "towered Camelot," who into the patterns of her loom did weave "the mirror-magic sights"—the woof of men's lives as woven by the loom of the law is not less complex, and he who knows her well dives deeper into the great ocean of human passion than all his brothers and knows his race, its longings, its strivings, its hates, its loves, as even the preacher in Ecclesiastes did not know them.
Judge Homes said that the law as lawyers knew her, seemed to him like a woman sitting beside the highway of life beneath whose overshadowing hood, men peering into her face can see their needs and their deserts—to the timid her smile gives hope; for the combatants fairly matched with foot to foot and breast to breast, she calmly keeps the list with stern and steadfast justice, while the guilty wretch who seeks for paths wherein she is not, finds her in the end and beneath her hood, he sees the awful face of death.
Among the dwellers of the Hymillayas where