26
The Courier Review.
tool, and the plough is a good tool, but if anything it outranks the lexicon. Our friend Ware was not at all surprised to find the beginning of a Lexicon in Babylon, but we find the Plough in use a great many ages before that. We must have the plough in order to be able to use the lexicon. They are both concerned with roots, they are both used to cultivate roots; and both are used to cultivate "greens".
More than twenty-five years ago I was introduced to a minister in the city of Detroit. He said, "What chair do you hold in your Agricultural College." The chair of English Literature I replied. And what, said he, has English literature to do with agriculture." We must be trained to think along these lines, and we shall find that labor and learning go together, and that gumption in learning is all there is worth having, and that gumption makes real energy in the world. It was impressed upon me that one may know a great deal about things and not know much or indeed anything of them. I suspect also that one may know a great deal of things and not know much about them. The two must go together. The world must feel the movement of both, learning must suggest and gumption must follow. Gumption must clear the way, and learning help to find. But Mr. Chancellor, I remember that I am No. 7, and do not know what No. 27 is thinking about just now. I know that the two are going together in the world. The lexicon helps the plough, and the plough supplements the lexicon. We must have something to live on. As the Representative of the State Agricultural College, but for lack of a little furnishing that would make it hard to accommodate you, I would invite you to be present on the completion of a building something like in character to yours. It speaks well for your growth because you have a magnificent building like this, and today nearly five hundred young people from the plough, or going to the plough are consulting a lexicon of about fifteen thousand volumes in the room of a building that compares pleasantly with yours. There will be room for sixty thousand volumes with class and reading rooms attached. Bye and bye, not very long hence, we will invite you
to congratulate us upon the completion of the furnishing of our lexicon, as we do you in your growth as shown on this great occasion.
John H. Atwood: "Source of a Lawyer's Brief."
That you are spared the infliction of listening to what my office boy pronounced as the greatest effort of my life, is due to that guileful old gentleman who presides over this magnificent banquet with such infinite grace, since he, having asked me to speak on one subject today, he, a few moments since, directed me to speak upon another; the moral of all of which is, put not your trust in Chancellors and do not prepare after-dinner speeches. But the unkindness of the Toast Master will not prevent me from awarding the praise which is his due; for 'tis true that in giving the theme that has been just pronounced a place among the subjects deemed worthy of consideration here, there has been a most perfect display of an appreciation of the eternal fitness of things, even though there was a failure to completely recognize the proprieties when I was joined as sponsor, to such a subject; for among the festivities incident to the completion of such a magnificent home for what Charles Lamb calls the guides, governors and best friends of men, books, such as that in which we now stand, and which is properly the occasion of your rejoicing today, surely the craft that perhaps more oftener than any other makes of books companions, should have a place if it be but a nich or corner. The mention of books and the immense possibilities incident to them, recalls Rufus Choate's answer to the young man's inquiry as to what one must know to be a good lawyer, which answer was, as you remember: "All there is to know and more too," the recognition of which truth constrains us to admit that there are no good lawyers (a popular belief) and mantles my cheek with blushes (though you may not see them) at the thought that I have permitted myself to be presented to you as a lawyer at all.
But to my subject—"The Sources of a Lawyer's Brief." What visions of books rise before