The Young Man and the World eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 302 pages of information about The Young Man and the World.

The Young Man and the World eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 302 pages of information about The Young Man and the World.

I do not mean that you should decline small cases.  By no means.  Take a five-dollar case, and work with the same sincerity that you would on a fifty-thousand-dollar case.  “Despise not the day of small things.”  In selecting your business, I refer to the quality, and not the magnitude, of cases.  Again, again, and still again, this counsel:  Care for your small case with the same painstaking labor you bestow upon a large one.

Never lose sight of the fact that your greatest reward is not your fee, but the doing of a perfect piece of work.  The same fervor and ideality should govern your labors in a lawsuit that inspire and control the great artist and inventor.  A distinguished sculptor said to me one evening: 

“I wish the matter of compensation could be wiped out of my consideration.  I must give it attention for obvious reasons, but it is the matter of least moment to me, and has absolutely no influence upon my work.”

It is no wonder that that man achieved an immortal renown at thirty-seven.  Doctor Barker, the recent occupant of the Chair of Anatomy in the University of Chicago, recently elected to an even more notable position in the Johns Hopkins University, who has won for himself a permanent place in the high seats of his profession by his work on neurology, was in a company one evening.  Said one of his admirers: 

“Why don’t you go into practise?  You could easily make a great fortune before you are forty.”

Listen to the answer:  “Money does not interest me.”

We all remember Agassiz’s famous reply to a proposition to deliver one lecture for a large fee:  “I must decline, gentlemen; I have no time to make money.”  That was why he was Agassiz.

Quite as lofty ideals should inspire the work of those who make their vows to the greatest of all sciences, the science of justice, and the greatest of all arts, the art of adjusting the rights of men.  No lawyer can become great who does not resolve, at the beginning of each case, to make his conduct of it a perfect piece of work, regardless of compensation.

John M. Butler, the partner of Senator McDonald, and one of the best lawyers the Central Western states ever produced, was so careful of pleadings and briefs that he would not endure a blurred or broken letter, and bad punctuation was a source of real irritation to him.  Many times have I, as his clerk, required his printer to take out an indistinct letter.  It was Mr. Butler’s ideal to achieve perfection as nearly as possible.

The most perfect legal argument I ever heard occupied less than an hour.  Not a word was wasted.  Not a single digression weakened the force of the reasoning.  Not a decision was read from.  It was assumed that the learned judges before whom the cause was being heard knew something of the law and the decisions themselves.

You see the same thing in its highest form in Marshall’s decisions.  I once advised a class of law students to commit to memory half a dozen of Marshall’s greatest opinions.  After years of reflection I think I shall stand by that advice.

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Project Gutenberg
The Young Man and the World from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.