YALE PROFESSORS--HARVARD LAW SCHOOL
The three Yale professors whose names after all these years stand out
most clearly to me are Thacher, Hadley, and Porter. Professor
Thacher taught Latin. They used to say he knew Tacitus by
heart--perhaps only a boyish emphasis upon his knowledge of the
language and literature. He was, at any rate, a good Latinist, and a
good teacher. What was perhaps more rare, he was a genial companion,
to whom the distance between professor and pupil was not impassable.
He won our sympathies because he gave us his; and our admiration, and
almost our affection, went with our sympathies. He was one of the
few college dignitaries upon whom the student feels himself
privileged to look back as a friend; for on his side the spirit of
friendly kindness governed the relations between us.
Of Professor Hadley's Hellenism we expressed our admiration by saying
he dreamed in Greek. To us, so long as we were in his hands, Greek
was the language of the gods. The modern heresies touching the place
of Greek in a liberal education had at that time not been heard of,
or had taken no hold upon the minds of either teacher or pupil. {21}
We learnt Greek, so far as we learnt it, in the same unquestioning
spirit as we read the Bible; so far as we read it. Hadley taught us
something more than grammar and prosody. He taught us to look at the
world through Greek eyes and to think Greek thoughts. To him the
Greek language and literature were not dead but alive, and he sought
to make them live again in his pupils. I don't say that he always
succeeded; or often, but at least we perceived his aim, and we
listened with delight to the roll of Homer's hexameters from his
flexible lips. For the time being he was a Greek. To this illusion
his dark eyes and olive skin and the soft full tones of his voice
contributed. Some of his enthusiasms, if not much of his learning,
imparted themselves to us. If we presently forgot what we learned,
the influence remained. "I do not ask," said Sainte-Beuve, "that a
man shall know Latin or Greek. All I ask is that he shall have known
it." A sentence in which there is a whole philosophy of education; a
philosophy which the universities that have abolished Greek out of
their compulsory courses forgot to take into account.
Professor Porter's mission was to implant in our young minds some
conception of Moral Philosophy and of Rhetoric. He taught
persuasively, sometimes eloquently, and always with a clearness of
thought and purpose which made him intelligible to the dullest and
instructive. He had another means of appeal to his students. He was
human and sympathetic. We looked {22} upon our professors as, for
the most part, beings far removed from us; exalted by their position
and virtues above us, and above mankind in general; a sort of
demigods who had descended to earth for the good of its inhabitants,
to whom, however, they were not of kin. We never thought that of
Professor Porter. He had a magical smile; it was the magic of
kindness. We fancied that the Faculty dealt with the students in a
spirit of strict justice; from their point of view if not always from
ours. They were a High Court of Justice which laid down the law and
enforced penalties out of proportion to the offence. It was law, and
the administration of it was inexorable. Not so Porter. He was
never a hanging judge. I know it because I owed to him the privilege
of remaining at Yale to the end of my four years. I have quite
forgotten what crime I committed, but it was one for which, according
to the strict code by which the undergraduates were governed,
expulsion was the proper sentence; or perhaps only suspension, which
in my case would have meant the same thing. But Professor Porter
intervened. There were mitigating circumstances. These he pressed
upon his colleagues, and I believe he even made himself answerable
for my good behaviour thereafter. I stayed on, and if I did not
profit as I ought to have profited by the opportunity I owed to him,
I was at least grateful to him, and still am.
Professor Porter became later President of Yale: one on the roll of
Chief Magistrates of the {23} University to whom not Yale only but
the country is, and for two hundred years has been, indebted. He
ruled wisely, fine administrative qualities reinforcing his scholarly
distinction. He was beloved, and his name is for ever a part of the
history of this great college.
Looking back on those days and on the Professors I have known since,
at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and one or two other American
universities, one thing impresses me beyond all others. It is the
spirit of devotion in those men; of devotion to learning, to letters,
to their colleges, and to their country. Many of them were, and many
in these days are, men who had before them other and far more
profitable careers. They might have won much wider fame and made a
great deal more money. They have been content with the appreciation
of their own world, and with salaries which, I believe, never exceed
six thousand dollars, and are commonly much less. When English
critics, albeit in a friendly spirit, have commented--in private, not
in public--on the American love of money-making, I have made this
answer, pointing to the absolute unselfishness of one of the highest
types of American citizen, all over the land, and to their conception
of what is best in American life. I have always added that though
others may speak of their renunciation as a sacrifice, they never do.
So far as I know them, they are content and more than content; they
rejoice in their work and in the modest circumstances which alone
their income permits. {24} Now and then we hear of some brilliant
scholar as having refused a lucrative post in order to go on teaching
and studying. There are many more whom we never hear of publicly, to
all of whom the country owes a debt of gratitude if nothing else,
which it does not always pay. But here in England if you state the
facts you will find them accepted, and welcomed as the best answer to
the reproach of money-ambitions--a reproach based on conspicuous
exceptions to the general American rule of thrift and simplicity.
After graduating at Yale, and after a year in Mr. Hoar's office at
Worcester, I went to the Harvard Law School. Harvard was as much a
Unitarian university as ever, but perhaps it was considered that law
was a safeguard against loose theology, or perhaps the old reasons
were no longer omnipotent. I attempt no comparisons between Yale and
Harvard. There is no kind of likeness between undergraduate and
post-graduate life. During four years at Yale the discipline had
been rigid. At the Law School in Cambridge I cannot remember that we
were under any restraint whatever. In New Haven we lived either in
the college dormitories or in houses approved by the Faculty; and I
am not sure that in my time we did not all sleep within the college
limits, insanitary and uncomfortable as many of the buildings then
were. But the law student in Cambridge lived where he would and as
he would. He went to chapel or not, week-days and Sundays alike, to
suit himself. {25} Not even attendance at the law lectures was
compulsory. It seems to have been held that students had come to the
school upon serious business, and that their own interest and the
success of their future careers would be enough to ensure their
presence. It was not always so. The very freedom which ought to
have put men on their honour sometimes became a temptation. And
Boston was a temptation; as it was, and must always be, to
undergraduates and graduates alike.
The years were drawing on--it was now 1854--and the sectional
antagonism of which there had been evidence enough at Yale was
increasing. We were older, and the crisis was nearer. There was a
kind of Law School Parliament in which all things were put to the
issue of debate, and the air often grew hot. Angry words were
exchanged between Southerners and Northerners. The rooted belief of
the Southerner, or of many Southerners, that they had a monopoly of
courage, was sometimes expressed. More than once challenges were
talked of, though I believe none was actually sent. There was a
choleric young gentleman from Missouri who put himself forward as
champion of slavery, and there was an attempt to deny to us of the
North the right to express our opinions on our own soil, which did
not succeed. The Missourian was the exception. Of the Southerners
in general at Harvard I should say what I have said of those at Yale:
if they felt themselves of a superior race they accepted the
obligations of superiority, and treated their {26} inferiors with an
amiable condescension for which we were not always grateful.
These were not matters of which the authorities of Dane Law School
took notice. Their business was to teach Law. Judge Parker was a
real lawyer, who afterwards revised the General Statutes of
Massachusetts into something like coherence and the symmetry of a
Code. He handled the law in a scientific spirit, without emphasis,
not without dry humour, and had ever a luminous method of exposition
which grew more luminous as the subjects grew more abstruse. His
colleague, Mr. Theophilus Parsons, was, I think, what is called a
case lawyer, to whom the _chose jugée_ was as sacred as it was more
recently to the anti-Dreyfusards. There are always, and I suppose
always will be, lawyers to whom decisions are more than principles.
Parsons was one of these, while Parker's aim was to present to the
student the entire body of law as a homogeneous whole, organic,
capable of abstract treatment, capable of being set forth in the dry
light of reason. Whether it was the difference in the men or in
their methods I know not, but there can be no doubt that Judge
Parker's lectures were better attended and more devoutly listened to
by the students, and that his system bore fruit. For it created a
habit of mind, and under his teaching a legal mind was formed, and
became a better instrument for use at the Bar.
The Bar of Massachusetts was at that time in a period of splendour,
as it had been for generations. {27} Webster was gone, and there was
no second Webster; he was the leader not only of the Massachusetts
Bar but of the American Bar. But Rufus Choate was still in his
prime, whose eccentricities of manner and of speech could not
disguise forensic abilities of almost the first order. Sydney
Bartlett, his rival, was as sound as Choate was showy. But Choate
also was sound, though he had a spirit of adventure which carried him
too far, and a rhetoric not seldom flamboyant. Some of his phrases
are historical, as of a witness who sought to palliate his dishonesty
by declaring that he never disclosed his iniquitous scheme. "A
soliloquy of fraud," retorted Choate. I heard one of his brethren at
the Bar say to him as he came into court: "I suppose you will give us
a great sensation to-day, Mr. Choate." "No," answered Choate, "it is
too great a case for sensation." And he tried it all day with
sedateness. Chief Justice Shaw disliked him, or disliked his
methods, and sometimes showed his dislike, overruling him rather
roughly. The great judge was not an Apollo, and there came a day
when Mr. Choate, smarting under judicial censure, remarked in an
audible aside to his associate counsel: "The Chief Justice suggests
to me an Indian idol. We feel that he is great and we see that he is
ugly." But amenities like that were unusual.
General Butler, afterward too famous at New Orleans and Fort Fisher,
yet after that the Democratic Governor of Whig Massachusetts, had a
none too savoury renown at the Bar. Yet it was {28} said of him by
an opponent: "If you try your case fairly, Butler will try his side
of it fairly; but if you play tricks he can play more tricks than you
can." His sense of humour was his own, sometimes effective and
sometimes not. Defending a railway against an action by a farmer
whose waggon had been run over by a train, and who alleged that the
look-out sign was not, as required by law, in letters five inches
long, Butler made him admit he had not looked at the sign. "Then,"
said Butler to the jury, "it could not have availed had the sign been
in letters of living light--five inches long."
The best contrast to Butler was Richard H. Dana, as good a lawyer, or
better, and with the best traditions of a high-minded Bar, pursued in
the best spirit. But I will leave Dana till I come to the Burns case.
{29}