come.

Are you fit for the emergency when it arises -perhaps unexpectedly? Have you been preparing yourselves for it through the waiting months-possibly years? Are you going to be found wanting when you come to be weighed in the final balance? That is the question. And, therefore, let me say to you, "When you have made yourselves members of this honorable and honored profession, and have found out that you are fit for it, break down the bridge behind you; let there be no retreat; take it, as you will take your wives by-and-by, 'for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer.

Now, then, being in the profession, and considering what is the grand essential and criterion of ultimate success (and by that I mean the success that is worth having), let me state as the central idea, the leading thought that I have to present to-day, that the success of the lawyer in the long run, and the best run, and the only run that is worth regarding, is exactly commensurate with his absolute, unflexible, unqualified devotion to the truth. The world has amused itself, and I suppose will continue to amuse itself, with a good deal of cheap wit on this subject. Many people think the lawyer has nothing to do with the truth; that his business is to pervert it, to distort it, to evade it, to crown it with the thorns of all manner of technicalities, and to crucify it between two thieves. Well, that is very amusing, doubtless; but it is a serious mistake. Let me state my proposition again, and you will live to see, as I have seen, the force of it; and you will see it now, if you pause to look at the lives of the distinguished men by whom you are surrounded. Your success will be in proportion

to the extent to which you become, not only the students, but the champions, the advocates, the living examples, in all respects and particulars, of the truth. And this should be especially impressed upon the young men of our profession for two reasons-because, in the first place, the truth that the lawyer deals with is not abstract truth. The quarrels of mankind over abstract propositions never did a great deal of good, though undoubtedly they may have done a great deal of harm. It is the practical application of the truth to all the affairs and concerns and interests and relations of human life that the lawyer deals with. In the next place, he is under a temptation that does not apply to the students after the truth in other branches, because there is often a pressure upon him—a pressure to counsel and to advocate what is not sound; and there is also a contest about it, and nothing in the world so controls a man's judgment upon any subject as to fight for it. Men always believe, sooner or later, in the cause they are fighting about; and, therefore, the lawyer needs to take special and peculiar care to be sure that he is right in his conclusions. In respect to legal truths, his relations are twofold—with his clients and with the courts. Public confidence, you will find, is a plant of slow growth; it is a pretty durable plant when it is grown, like most plants of slow growth, and it only grows in that soil which produces wise, safe, and successful counsel. He only commands. it who is generally found to be right. And then when the lawyer comes to deal with tribunals of justice, with those learned judges by whom his reputation is to be made, if it is to be made at all-for, let the unthinking crowd say what they will, it is the judges

of the courts before whom you appear who best know what stuff you are made of, and who are the authors of all real, sound reputation that you succeed in acquiring-when you come to deal with them, you will find that your triumphs are always won on the right side instead of on the wrong. It is not given to any advocate approaching a cause, as he always must, from one side-not as the learned judge approaches it, by hearing both sides—it is not given to any advocate to be always right. Questions of law are difficult and intricate; courts may differ with you, even if the court itself be wrong; the facts may turn out to be other than they were represented; evidence is conflicting; juries are uncertain; it is not given, it cannot be given, to any man to be always in the right. But the oftener he is in the right, the better for him; and, as I have said, the triumphs he achieves, the steps that, one after another, he cuts in the solid rock and by which he ascends, are in behalf of the right side, and not in behalf of the wrong.

Now, the great requisite, as it seems to me-the one that is, in its perfection, I have often thought, the very rarest intellectual quality that a man is capable of, the one to be most assiduously cultivated, and, perhaps, the one that best repays culture, is what, for want of a better term, I may call intellectual honesty. It is a mental and not a moral quality. Of course, it is one which involves high moral integrity, and can only exist with high moral integrity. But those who are honest in intentions and purposes, merely, may fall far short of it. By "intellectual honesty" I mean the faculty of seeing things just as they are unmoved by prejudice, or passion, or excitement, or clamor

seeing them, and reaching conclusions in regard to them, in a straightforward and direct, instead of a circuitous, way. That is the leading characteristic of every great lawyer or great judge that has ever lived, and the want of it is the reason why the world has seen so many good lawyers and good judges, and so few great ones. It is the rarest of qualities in its perfection, and the first to be recognized by mankind when it exists. Men will quarrel over the merits of poets and statesmen and inventors, but when that magistrate presents himself in the administration of justice who has in a high degree this quality of "intellectual honesty," everybody recognizes and appreciates it. Perhaps the most illustrious example there has ever been, among many illustrious examples of that quality, was Chief Justice Marshall-that magistrate of all magistrates-whose splendid judgments have entered, not only into the jurisprudence, but into the history and literature of our country. They need no longer be consulted to ascertain what the law is, because the conclusions at which they arrive have long ago been laid up among the settled principles of jurisprudence; but as models of honest, straightforward, lucid reasoning, and of the highest judicial style, they deserve to be read, and will be read, in all time. You need not be reminded-because you have already given some attention to the history of the law of your own country-how successful those great judgments were in their effect upon the popular mind. When the construction of the American Constitution was a thing of doubt; when the Constitution itself-its success, its practicability-was questioned; when men's minds were wrought up to the highest pitch

of political and personal excitement, those great judgments of Marshall and his compeers ended all dispute. No man went away cursing the Court and resolved to renew the quarrel. The defeated side went away admitting they had been mistaken. That illustrates the idea I advanced just now: that this quality, where it exists in a high degree, is universally recognized by mankind and commands immediate confidence.

But, gentlemen, no man is going to achieve a complete devotion to the truth who seeks for it on one subject alone. He must be equally devoted to the truth in all things. The thoughts and the sentiments of his whole life on all subjects must be shaped and ruled by it. I am asked, "What is the truth?" The truth of the law you may ascertain from the authorities; but what is truth at large? Man has been at war, ever since Cain slew Abel, upon this question. The truth, my friends, is the deliberate, conscientious conviction of an intelligent and thoughtful mind; that is what the truth is to that man; and that is what will be credited to him as the truth, probably, in the world that will set all the mistakes of this world right— what some great soul has been willing to die forthat is "the truth." For a man to stand by the truth all the days of his life, in that sense of the word, requires another quality which, I am sorry to say, seems to be very rare in these days, and not to be growing more common, and that is moral courage. You can find men enough that will face batteries; you will find very few that will face majorities-few who will stand up against the pressure of an erroneous, an excited, and a deluded popular opinion; few that are not afraid to be left alone, like children in the dark; few that are