better attained by admitting all persons, the parties themselves, persons interested, and even convicts, if they know anything relevant to the matter in issue, to give in their testimony and let it pass for what it is worth. The wide latitude of cross-examination, the astuteness of counsel, and the good sense of jurors, make it highly improbable that a false witness would escape detection. At all events the evil would be less than that which now results from the frequent exclusion of testimony which may be indispensable. (a)

I have thus recapitulated some of the more prominent points, in which our law, though in the main so excellent, may admit of improvement; and I commend them to your serious and deliberate consideration. During the period in which you are to be actors on the public stage, the topics I have been suggesting will be among those of the most absorbing interest. Even the existence of our Union, if not of free government itself, may be involved in some of them. It is the part of wisdom, therefore, to examine them in all their bearings, that your opinions may be fully made up when the time comes for action.

§ 266. Ways and Means of Professional Success. It would seem appropriate that I should close this lecture with some suggestions respecting professional success. I presume you have not selected the law as a road to great wealth; for, if so, you are almost sure to be disappointed. No lawyer in this country can become very rich in the strict pursuit of his profession. If great and rapid gains be your object, there are many vocations to be chosen before this. But if properly pursued, it will lead to independence, which is all a wise man need desire. And as to reputation, it opens an ample field. Tastes may differ on this subject; but for myself, had I the most burning thirst for fame, I would rather be a great jurist than a great statesman or hero. To answer, therefore, the question, what is included in the idea of professional success, I would say that it embraces moderate emolument and high reputation; or, in other words, that he who, at the end of his career, has acquired a reasonable independence and an honored name, has been a successful lawyer. The question then is, what are the conditions of success as thus defined? Undoubtedly, the first condition of all success is to deserve it. And this is pre-eminently true of success at the bar, which cannot be the result of luck or chance. Accident has made many a hero, and many a king, but never a Mansfield or a Marshall. And, on the other hand, there is a moral certainty of success, if you do but deserve it. You will not have it suddenly, for it is a plant of slow growth. You must take not days or months, but years, into the account. And as certainly as those years come round, so certainly will success come with them, if it be deserved. Indolence may excuse itself by the miserable plea of fatalism, that

(a) This has all been accomplished by the Code.

merit is not sure to meet its reward. But this is an error as pernicious as it is stale. Every observer knows that there is a sure retribution, even in this world. Public opinion may err for the moment, but in the long run it always comes out right. The question, then, is reduced to this: How are you to deserve success in your profession?

The first requisite, certainly, is a competent knowledge of the law. This has been sufficiently dwelt upon already. But I will add, that it is not enough to know and have the precise books, in which this knowledge can be had. It must be ready, available knowledge. You must have it at your tongue's end, or it may come too late for use. At first, this condition is hard to be complied with; but it will become easier as you advance. Every case will be a lesson. Your whole professional life will be one of progressive improvement. Item after item will be daily added to the sum of knowledge, until you find yourselves accomplished at all points. Prepare your first case thoroughly, and this will not only gain you a second, but enable you the more easily to master it. Thus every step you take will prepare you, with less effort to step still higher, until you reach that eminence where toil is at an end.

But a competent knowledge of the law, although the first, is not the only condition of success. The most learned of lawyers would not get business if he did not attend to it. The question. with the client is, who will manage his cause the best? And other things being equal, he will manage a cause the best, who devotes most attention to it. Next to legal knowledge, therefore, the most important condition of success is, a habit of strict attention to business. Your clients must know where to find you and when to find you. Once establish a reputation for attending faithfully to whatever you undertake, and this alone will secure you a good share of business. But in order to do this, you must make the law your exclusive pursuit. You cannot be men of all work and lawyers besides. In this country, the temptation is strong to diverge from the profession, either for the sake of speculation or politics. Our young men are anxious to make money faster than by fees, and therefore enter upon a course of speculation; or, to gain notoriety faster than by regular practice, and therefore plunge into politics. But either course is fatal to distinguished professional success. The law cannot be put on and taken off like a garment. It requires all the energies you can command; and just in proportion as you direct them to other pursuits, you discourage clients from employing you, because you disqualify yourselves for attending faithfully to their interests.

Supposing, then, that you have a competent knowledge of the law, and that you attend strictly to business, is any thing more required? Undoubtedly one thing more, and that the greatest of all; I mean professional integrity. Be not misled by the false idea that cunning can be successfully substituted in its place.

Now or then a trick or stratagem may succeed; but in the end chicanery always ruins him who practises it. Be as acute and discriminating as you please, but by all means avoid artifice. It never yet raised a man to honorable distinction. A cunning lawyer, if not a knave, is very likely to be mistaken for one; whereas, uncompromising probity is sure to win confidence in every quarter. You will find it as true in your practice, as in geometry, that the straight line is always the shortest distance between two points; and that the most adroit manoeuvring or finesse can never prove a match for downright integrity. The rule I would inculcate not only excludes all indirection in doing business, but in obtaining it. Were I to concentrate in a single word whatever I can conceive of despicable in our profession, it would be pettifogging. I would have you feel that it is infinitely better to wait years for a case, than to obtain it by fomenting litigation. Dig or beg, if necessity drive you to it, and it will be respectable; but resolve to starve, sooner than prowl about courts for human victims. I am the more anxious to dwell upon the necessity of professional integrity, because the moral character which should belong to our profession is often egregiously misconceived or misrepresented. The vulgar notion is, that lawyers are seldom honest men. Because the profession abounds with opportunities for the practice of dishonesty, and because, occasionally, lawyers have been found who have no scruples on this score, the exceptions are perversely mistaken for the general rule, and the more ignorant part of the community seem really to believe that the conscience of every lawyer can be bought and sold. They also affect to find Scripture authority for this prejudice, in the woe so emphatically denounced upon lawyers; not knowing that a very different sort of lawyers are there anathematized. But the most efficient cause of this wholesale libel upon the profession, is to be found in the fact, that, with very few exceptions, whereever you find a lawyer introduced into the popular fictions of the day, you find him represented as an arrant knave. I need not refer to instances, for hundreds will suggest themselves. You can scarcely call to mind a novel or a drama, where a lawyer figures at all, in which he is not made use of to help out some infamous scheme of villany. In fact, I have heard this very cir cumstance adduced to prove that rascality must be a prominent attribute of the profession. But be the cause of the misconception what it may, we know the fact to be, that popular sentiment is greatly against us, insomuch that the question is often asked, whether the world would not be better off if there were no lawyers. No doubt it would be a happy state of society in which lawyers could be entirely dispensed with; for it would be that perfect state in which laws themselves would be superfluous; and it may also be admitted that just in proportion as laws become simple and certain, the demand for lawyers will grow less, because litigation, which is their aliment, will be correspondingly

Let

diminished. But so long as the litigious spirit exists among mankind, and the uncertainty which belongs to all human affairs furnishes occasion for its exercise the principle which requires a division of labor in all other cases will require it also in this; and we may safely conclude that a distinct class of men will always be required to conduct the litigation of their fellow men. Indeed, those who join in the obloquy so generally cast upon us, seem to forget that in so doing they reproach mankind in the mass. the demand for lawyers be diminished, and the supply will correspond. Let men cease to be contentious, and be always ready to do right without compulsion, and lawyers will not trouble them. But while it is evident that without dishonest clients there would be no dishonest lawyers; and that as a profession we are grossly belied by this indiscriminate censure; yet it may perhaps be safely admitted, that the standard of professional ethics is not always as elevated as the honor of the profession requires it should be. In fact, it is by no means easy to fix a precise standard. There is not, perhaps, a more difficult question in casuistry, than that which every lawyer has to decide in determining the nature and extent. of his professional obligations. We are, however, to remember at the outset, that in becoming attorneys, we do not cease to be moral agents; that in pledging ourselves to our clients, we do not also pledge to them our consciences; and therefore, that no principle can justify us in doing, or our clients in requiring us to do for them, what we should blush to think of doing for ourselves. It is also obvious that even on selfish principles, honesty is the best policy for us, as it is for all other men; and, therefore, that in consultations with clients, we are not only morally bound to tell them frankly our real opinions, but it is manifestly our interest so to do, because otherwise we shall soon cease to be consulted. Again, it is clear that in conducting proceedings through the various stages of litigation, we can never be justified in attempting to mislead either the court or jury, by wilfully misrepresenting the law or the facts. Thus far there can be no room for hesitation. But if we believe that our client has the wrong side, and have candidly told him so, are we then justified in undertaking his cause, if he should persist in having it litigated? This is a question of no small difficulty, and it arises in two classes of cases; namely, first, when we believe the law to be against our client; and secondly, when, though the law may be with him, the abstract justice of the case appears to be against him. With regard to the first, when we think the law to be against him, it would seem that after so informing him, if he should still persist, we need not hesitate to act for him; because we are not infallible, and peradventure the law may turn out to be the other way; or he may have justice on his side, though the law may seem against him; and in either case, he ought not to be cut off from the chances of litigation. The chief difficulty then arises in the second class of cases, where we believe right and justice to be against our client, though the law may be

with him. But even here, I have come to the conclusion, that no principle of moral obligation prohibits me from prosecuting his cause. In the first place, I am not an infallible judge of right and wrong, and possibly I may be mistaken; but at all events, I am not his conscience keeper. I undertake only to assert his legal rights; and if, in so doing, I make use of no chicanery or deception, I come out of the cause with clean hands. The question of abstract justice is with him, and not with me; and I am as much justified in conducting his cause, as the judge is in deciding it for him. But there is another more comprehensive view conducting to the same result. Every man, as a general condition of the social compact, has a right to have his case fairly presented before the court; and it is the province of counsel to assist him in so doing. Now, although there may be particular cases, which, considered by themselves, ought not to be prosecuted, yet as no line of demarcation can be drawn beforehand, to indicate which these are; if it were the duty of counsel to decide in each case, the preliminary moral question, whether they ought to undertake it, their decision against any case would be a prejudging of its merits, which might operate prejudicially upon the final result; and on this account it is a good general rule, that counsel are not to be held responsible for the moral character of the cause they advocate, but only for the manner in which they discharge their duty. This reasoning may be fallacious, but it has satisfied my own mind. I desire, however, to be distinctly understood. I abhor, as much as any one, the rascally maxim that everything is fair in litigation. I hold that the greatest fee ever offered is no justification for attempting to gain a cause by dishonest means; and I look upon that lawyer as essentially a knave, who practises upon such a doctrine. Such then are my views of professional integrity, as indispensable to professional success. I have considered the question chiefly in a worldly point of view. And the result is, that if there were no such thing as religious or moral obligation, it would still be true, that the strictest honesty is the lawyer's wisest policy. Confidence and trust are the life-blood of his being; and the All-wise Creator has ordained that integrity alone can inspire confidence and trust. Set out, then, with the unwavering purpose, that, come what may, you will hold fast to your integrity; and that the world may always know where to find you, by simply considering where you ought to be found. Let this unbending integrity co-operate with a daily increasing knowledge of the law, and a faithful attention to the business committed to you, and your success is as certain as any thing future can be. (a)

(a) There is an excellent article on The Rights and Duties of Advocates, in the Edinburgh Review, for October, 1836, No. CXXIX. p. 82.