HAVE been asked to reply to Arthur Train's valedictory to the Bar. In the first place, he may rest assured that the 14,999 lawyers more or less remaining in practice in the City of New York have no heart burning over his announced abandonment of our profession. Even the disappearance of so gifted a person as Mr. Train will make no appreciable change in the great City. I am rather afraid that clients must have hesitated to bring to him legal problems having no exciting human interest and with no literary possibilities. It might well be that the average litigant or client in trouble over a lease might prefer a non-literary lawyer.

The fact that he has left us, therefore, is not distressing, for one lawyer more or less makes relatively little difference. His reasons for retiring to the pursuit of literature are, however, more interesting.

I disregard the frequent Biblical quotations with which his jeremiad upon law as a profession is profusely entwined. I do not infer that he has "got religion". I assume that these apt quotations are due not to penitence but rather to the chance possession of Cruden's "Concordance of the Holy Scriptures", and that his agile and versatile mind has found a use for all the citations in the good book under the word "Law" which seem to cast a slur upon law as a form of bondage of the spirit. It would, however, be equally easy for me to fill my paper from the same source with quotations which might make him repent his valedictory.

The good book says somewhere, for example, that "the law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul", or something to that effect. The main trouble with Mr. Train is that he apparently became interested in the wrong law.

Let us take up, therefore, the various charges he makes against law as a profession. His principal grievance, I take it, is that he thinks it has cramped his style. Those of us who read his law stories with pleasure could fairly enter a general denial and set up a counter claim of gross ingratitude. The law has furnished his literary material and the bread of his living for twenty five years. On it he has thrived as a writer of engaging legal yarns. Why bite the hand which has fed him?

When he declares that the law makes its practitioners tautological he is perhaps right, for his paper contains at least one gross illustration of this vice. He says: "But at length like Sauland at about the same age - I saw a great light and I gave up persecuting the innocent people who had been the victims of my cupidity, egotism, verbosity, and bad manners. Thereafter, as the prophet Jeremiah remarks, 'they that handle the law knew me not.""

This I take it is a long way of saying that he lost his job as assistant district attorney in New York City. These things will happen. Administrations change. It happened, moreover, a great many years ago when Mr. Train was known as one of Jerome's brilliant young men and a member of perhaps the most gifted staff the district attor

ney's office ever had. These were the days when he was quietly laying in his literary material from a daily professional study of bad men in the endless panorama of human life at its worst. All of which reminds me to say a word about the present New York District Attorney, who bears the fine Biblical name of Joab H. Banton. Mr. Banton enjoys the distinction of being the most noiseless person who was ever elected to that office. Not only does he not write, but he does not even spend his time talking to the newspapers or telling the world the exciting story of what he is going to do with some person who - perhaps is about to be indicted. A district attorney without a brass band is a novelty in New York and unheard of in Chicago. Mr. Banton's cruel theory seems to be that his assistants should likewise keep out of the newspapers and spend all their time in accommodating criminals to early trials. I am giving this short advertisement to him, since he is the first New York district attorney I have ever known who failed fully to advertise himself. This in passing. Train is a graduate of the old brass band school, and his former chief was quite orthodox on this important point.

To dwell on the matter of style for a moment. If there is any one thing a good lawyer should be able to do, it is to express himself clearly. If he draws a will or a contract so that it can mean two or three things instead of only one, he is likely to get into trouble. He may make litigation but he is almost sure to lose clients; and clients in the long run are better than an occasional law suit. Exactness is the contribution the law makes to style. The best judicial opinions, for example, are often written in a style to use the word in its strictly literary sense-which the professional writer can scarcely im

prove upon. I never read one of Judge Cardozo's opinions in our New York Court of Appeals without a sense of admiration for the condensed clarity of its English.

The complaint of verbosity and of antique terminology which Mr. Train makes should have been limited to the oldest, most conservative, most technical, and most unprogressive branch of jurisprudence real estate law. The only way in which the waste of words for example on deeds and mortgages has been overcome, at least with us in New York, is by a statute commanding short forms and making you pay extra for recording the long old ones. My partner, who not only practises but by some mysterious providence of God seems to enjoy this branch of legal work, occasionally places on my desk one of those long term "ground leases" which take forty pages to say that the tenant has no rights in the demised premises except to keep at his risk a papier-mâché gold fish, provided he removes it at his expense at or before the termination of the term. It is all very solemn and probably necessary but it is not very thrilling. As for style, conveyancers hate it, as involving unnecessary risks whereas old precedents avoid them. Clients are unreasonable enough to prefer to avoid risks instead of encouraging style on the part of their lawyers. The objection should be laid to the door of the client and not to the lawyers.

All the other reasons which Mr. Train enumerates for leaving the profession seem to me good reasons for staying in it. Our experiences, apparently, have been quite different. He complains that:

I had a burden, and a grievous one, which was my inability as a lawyer to express my own mind, and the fact that I was rapidly

losing whatever individuality I had ever possessed; was in short becoming a mere composite or echo of all the other lawyers who had lived before me, even from the beginning of the world.

On the contrary it has been my in no wise unusual professional experience to be constantly engaged in expressing my own mind. What the average client really needs is not merely abstract law, but the opinion upon his problems of one sufficiently detached from them to get a somewhat different and perhaps truer perspective. Mr. Train says:

We cannot advise our clients according to the standards of ethics, morals, or even "justice", but must, irrespective of the common sense of the matter, perforce be bound by the idiosyncratic decision of some irascible bigwig several hundred years gone by, which has kept on growing like a legal stalactite and upon which our misfortune is about to crystallize as the final drop.

This is beautifully said but it does not say much sense. Most of the stalactites of injustice with which I have been familiar have been not old but new, and made not by the courts but generally by the legislatures.

I am reminded in this connection of a conversation I sat in on a good many years ago between a distinguished jurist now the presiding justice of one of our Appellate Courts and Theodore Roosevelt. "Theodore," said the Judge softly, "this is the way we decide cases.

We first find out whether

we think the judgment below was right. If we do, we generally let it alone. If we think it was wrong, we generally find something in it to hang our hats on."

There are so many precedents that Justice can generally find one on which to hang her hat. I, therefore, dismiss Mr. Train's Babylonian reports and the precedents of Shadrach against Abednego without further comment.

The valedictorian complains that the law spoils one's sense of humor:

In order to satisfy his client's require ments a lawyer must conceal all his natural high spirits, imagination, and interest in the lighter and more agreeable side of living. He must seem to be immersed in the profundity of his own vacuity.

The solemn asses of the world are widely distributed and the law of course has its share, but the profession neither maintains nor seeks to maintain a monopoly. Mr. Choate's clients, for example, generally found that his sense of humor was not a liability but an asset. As a law student I watched the trial of the famous case of Laidlaw against Sage. I shall never forget the painfully disconcerting effect which Mr. Choate's bubbling humor had upon Colonel James who represented Sage.

I remember an illuminating comment I once heard on an old trial lawyer who defended railroad accident cases in the New York courts for thirty years. He was highly learned, spoke through his nose, and was very solemn. The comment was this: "He always looked as if he expected to get stuck for a million dollars and his jurors got the idea and tried to accommodate him."

When you have a clear liability case and it is only a question of "how much", a lighthearted Christian Science attitude toward the plaintiff's bodily afflictions generally helps a good deal in getting a glancing blow instead of a knockout in the inevitable verdict. There is no real reason for a lawyer to undergo an operation to remove his sense of humor. Dignity, which La Rochefoucauld defines as "a mystery of the body intended to conceal the defects of the mind", is not a necessary attribute of the lawyer. Legal perplexities are to the average client bad enough anyway, without the solemnity of a legal pundit to make them worse. The wise lawyer knows it and conducts himself accordingly.

The diatribe in which Mr. Train in

dulges against "the trial lawyer" who spends his days in the courts is the most unjustified of all his accusations against our unfortunate profession. He says:

They make the worst husbands in the world, for they are irritable, caustic, grouchy, cantankerous, and ill mannered, insisting upon quarreling over the most inconsequential matters, demanding a "yes or no answer when nobody cares a damn one way or the other, hammering at and refusing to drop a subject until they have forced an admission of their correctness or driven everybody else out of the room. They do not allow their wives enough money and they cross examine them and their offspring as to where they have been and what they have been doing, until the poor things have no escape except by prevarication or homicide.

If that is what being a trial lawyer did to the valedictorian, it is perhaps right for him to quit. But this is no true picture of the home life of the typical trial lawyer. All the average overworked trial lawyer asks of his family is that they let him alone. That his wife get accustomed to his not coming home to dinner and that she make the stock excuse when he fails to appear at the home of the friends with whom they are supposed to dine. He does not nag or cross examine his children. He confers upon them the blessing of almost complete neglect.

He is engrossed so much of the time with squabbles in which he is hired to participate that he is almost dumb about the house. He gets his money in lumps generally not so big as they ought to be, and when he has it, his family shares in it. They live, not from hand to mouth, but from lump to lump, and look forward from one prospective fee to another even further off. It is the hope that the furthest off fee will ultimately eventuate which keeps them alive.

The trial lawyer is in a perpetual state of excitement which he tries to keep to himself; all he asks when he gets

home, if he gets there at all, is to be allowed to go to bed early. He does not read anything except law reports and stenographers' minutes. His stenographer has either nothing to do or more rush work to get out in an hour or so than she ought to be expected to do in a day. She gets nervous prostration and her young man quits in disgust when he is left with tickets in his hands and no girl four or five times in succession.

The unkind remarks which Mr. Train quotes from Jeremy Bentham against lawyers are more than a century out of date. Macaulay says somewhere of Bentham that he "found jurisprudence a gibberish and he left it a science". Neither end of this famous sentence was more than half true. Moreover, Bentham's particular bête noir, Lord Eldon, has been dead a good while, and the unprogressive and wholly reactionary attitude of both the courts and the legal profession in England against which Bentham complained with much justice, but in an abominable style, has passed long ago. The law is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer and it will, I am sure, survive the humorous assaults of a new and, alas, transitory Bentham in the person of the creator of Mr. Tutt.

Balzac says somewhere that there must be a heaven, for there is nothing perfect in this world but misery. The law as a profession has its fair share in the fallibility of an imperfect world. It is, however, doing its part, and more, in mitigating the asperities of life and making toward a civilization in which justice is a reality, and peace among nations something more than a delusion or a remote and impracticable ideal. "They that forsake the law, praise the wicked; but such as keep to the law contend with them" (Proverbs 28:4).

ONE

NE of the commonest delusions of sane persons is that the writings of psychopaths are without value or interest. They are usually of greater merit artistically, and far more informative and suggestive, than those of the equilibrated. Contrast, for instance, Ford Madox Ford's book on Joseph Conrad with Henry Festing Jones's book on Samuel Butler. One is life, the other is death; one is clay into which the breath of life has been breathed, tenuous, elastic, receptive, emissive; the other is inanimate, inert, rigid, and crumbles when you handle it.

Mr. Ford has megalomania and glories in it. He has systematized delusions of grandeur to which his conduct conforms. He believes he is, and has been in his generation, the finest stylist in the English language and he expresses himself as if convinced that not only did he teach Joseph Conrad to write, but that the renown of the romancer was due in large measure to his collaboration. They are harmless delusions and do not interfere one jot or tittle with my enjoyment of his books. Indeed, as he grows older and fatter he writes better and better. Few contemporary English writers could excel "Some Do Not

Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. Smith knew, but I am convinced that he would be pleased that I should know him as his modest friend depicts him.

"A biography should be a novel." That seems fair, since most novels are biographies. Mr. Ford has written a novel about Joseph Conrad and he has achieved a work of art. It will have the same effect upon readers as Rodin's sculptures have upon searchers for æsthetic stimulation or appeasement. Some will be moved to smash, others will be thrilled. All will admit merit. It is an informative, not a documented book, informative of a soul, not a body; not how many days he lived and where he lived, but how he lived and thought; how he dreamed and loved; how he interpreted men's conduct and how he shaped his own. The work is a remembrance, a logical unfolding of Joseph Conrad as he appeared to Mr. Ford from the first days of their acquaintance to the last. We are told little about Conrad's political, religious, and social ideas.

Mr. Ford was

no more curious to know what his friend's past was than we are to know that an English dramatist made a shapeless play out of one of Mr. Ford's novels. Yet the latter episode becomes important when we learn that this, and Mr. Ford's interest in the publication of a review, were the cause of the only "scolding" he ever got from Conrad. Forbearing and forgiving Conrad, diffident and reticent Mr. Ford!