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I Enter Upon the Practice of Law and Get Out Again
It was in the early seventies when I was admitted to practice law.
Where to locate was the question.
There was nothing to be done at home, for the bar was overcrowded with really able attorneys.
At the same time business was diminishing rather than increasing in volume.
At that time the West was an Eldorado.
Men were selling their farms in the East to follow Horace Greeley’s advice.
In Kansas, Nebraska, and further west a hundred and sixty acres of land were to be had for the asking.
This, at least, was an alternative if the law failed.
I fell into the current, visited Pittsburg, where I spent some weeks.
Then I drifted on to Chicago, which had just passed through its devastating fire.
Finally I heard from an old college friend in another city, who spoke with much enthusiasm of the opportunities there.
I joined him.
Fortunately I had some little money left.
But my aims and ambitions were as indefinite as ever.
I felt an instinctive inclination to business, and yet business as a clerk or in an office did not satisfy me.
I spent considerable time drifting around.
Finally, with a letter of introduction, I made my way to the office of Judge Johnson, one of the leading lawyers in the city.
He had recently retired from the bench and had a large practice of a mixed description.
He was a lawyer of the old school.
He handled real estate, was administrator or trustee of many properties, and represented the leading railway entering the city.
I presented my credentials to him, and he finally gave me office room and entrusted me with the collection of his rents.
I spent a number of years in that office, and there learned all the law I ever acquired.
But the law did not satisfy me.
It was too dry and too intricate.
I used to sit in the long dusty library and contemplate the backs of such books as Byles on Bills, Bump on Bankruptcy, and wonder how men had ever brought themselves to the task of collecting and digesting the thousands of cases found between their covers.
The law might be “the sublimity of human reason,” as Coke said, but when I contemplated its workings, I questioned it.
The poor were harrassed out of whatever rights they had, by delays, costs and expenses.
I was frequently sent out to gather testimony preparatory to suit, in cases where men had been injured or killed in railway accidents, for our instructions were to settle nothing except as a last resort, and to carry all cases through to the Court of Appeals.
Judge Johnson used to accept the verdicts of the juries with quiet equanimity, for he usually managed to get some error in the record which enabled him to secure a reversal in the higher courts.
He was said to be the most successful lawyer on the line, not through his ability to move a jury, but rather through his ability to tangle up a case so that he got relief in the appellate court.
This was his policy, and as it took from one to two years to get a case tried in the lower court, and two years more to get it through the upper courts, the delays usually wore out litigants until they were willing to settle on almost any terms.
All these technicalities and delays bored me.
Then, too, it hurt my sense of simplicity and justice to think that it required three or four years, two and sometimes three or four trials, with endless costs, pleadings, papers and conferences, to determine whether a man had been injured by his own negligence or that of the company, or whether A or B owned a piece of land.
Then, too, it used to offend me to see a cause thrown out of court because the lawyer had sued in trespass and not in case, or had made some other technical error in his pleadings.
When I contemplated the statue of Justice which adorned the top of the Court House, I used to feel that under the bandage which covered her eyes she must be laughing at the way we were doing things below her.
All these things made the law repellant to me.
But it was not at this that I revolted.
Some years after I began to practice our office was ordered to foreclose a large number of mortgages upon farms along the right of way of the railway which we represented.
I investigated the history of the transaction, and found that when the railroad was built its representatives had gone along in advance of it and induced towns to vote subscriptions to its capital stock.
Further than this, they had talked to the farmers, and told them that the railroad would greatly increase the value of their land and afford them an easy market for their produce.
By such means they had induced the farmers to mortgage their land and exchange these mortgages for stock in the railway.
The railway promoters had then used these mortgages, together with the railway right of way, to secure a large issue of bonds, ostensibly to pay for its construction.
But instead of proceeding honestly, a construction company had been organized, composed of the same men who were back of the railway.
This construction company contracted to build the road for a fictitious sum greatly in excess of its cost, and to take its pay in the bonds.
These bonds were issued, the railway partly constructed; then default was made in the interest, and a receiver appointed by the courts.
The stock which the towns had bonded themselves to subscribe for was worthless.
So was the stock which the farmers had received, and with the foreclosure of the railway, similar proceedings against their farms were instituted also.
The farmers naturally resisted.
Slowly they came to realize the situation.
They organized against the process of the courts, but gradually one after another the farms were foreclosed and the property bought in by speculators at ridiculously low figures.
I could not stand for this, and my lack of interest in court work increased rather than diminished.
I have watched the courts ever since.
They were even better in those days than they are now.
In fact, a position on the bench was at that time the highest honor in the community.
Since then the bench does not command the best lawyers.
As a matter of fact, in many instances the best lawyers could not be elected even if they chose.
For the boss who controls the party usually makes the nominations for the bench just as he does for the legislature.
Today in many States the judges are chosen by men who want to use them, and they know pretty well before the convention what a man’s equation of prejudice or party loyalty is.
I used to think the bench was almost sacred.
But I have come to find it very human.
On political questions its partisanship crops out whether it be a State or Federal court.
The local trial courts do not dare go very far away from the people, for the people are their neighbors.
So you will find the lower courts more likely to reflect popular opinion than the appellate ones.
Not infrequently the appellate courts are nominated by the organization for political or private purposes, and they are never permitted to forget it.
It was for such reasons as these that I gradually drifted away from the law.
I remained in Judge Johnson’s office and took care of his business interests, of which he was careless.
One day he put me at work examining into a proposed right of way of a new railway which was planning an entrance to the city.
He told me the road was to be built and where its terminus lay.
This turned out to be another of those lucky turns which have seemingly come to me from time to time throughout my life.
I realized that this would greatly enhance the value of property about the right of way and the terminal, and proceeded to acquire options and buy such land as I could about the proposed railway site.
In this I took little hazard, for the city was growing rapidly and the investments were sure to be sound, even though the railway was not built.
But fortunately for me, it was constructed as planned.
As soon as its right of way was acquired and its terminus known, land went up by leaps and bounds.
I sold some of my options at twice their cost to me, but held on to the majority of them.
Some of this land I still hold.
All of it went up from two hundred to three hundred per cent.
Some of it is now yielding me an annual income far in excess of its original cost.
In a few years’ time, by this lucky strike, I had become independently rich.
But little of it had come from my law practice.
And as time went on I abandoned that which I had and devoted myself to real estate speculation, into which I entered with a zest and delight that the law had never inspired.
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