and the greatest jurist of our orators, declared that he was able to find one or two hours a day for legal reading, beyond and beside cases already under investigation. Judge Dillon said Blackstone should be read by every lawyer once a year.

No lawyer yet, perhaps, ever exhausted his case, or ever tried it as best he might, for no lawyer ever yet had time, after he once got his case, to do all the reading and preparation possible before its trial. There was a remarkable example of incessant work accomplishing grand results in the case of Judge Douglas, one of the pioneer lawyers of Michigan. Many, many years ago he became interested in litigation over an estate. With the bulldog tenacity of a man of strong character he gave his whole energy to the solution of the hundreds of problems that arose in connection with its litigation. Time and time again he was defeated, but never discouraged. Lawyers of the bar looked on and laughed. There were those who even hinted that Judge Douglas was mentally unbalanced. Almost a generation of lawyers came and went while this tremendous worker kept on at his prodigious task. He surrounded himself in his office and in his home with a splendid library, buying everything that he could get his hands on that would in any way throw light on the law. He read and read, and studied and studied, until old age came on and men began to pity. Finally, fearing that he must die before accomplishing his work, he called in a younger lawyer and spent days and nights eloquently rehearsing the story of the case, saturating him with his own convictions, loading him up with authorities and inspiring him with confidence in ultimate triumphall this in order that should he die on the battlefield some one might take up the fight. In the very last days of his life, when scarcely able to raise his voice or read the words of the printed page, victory came, and then he laid himself down and died, and his fame in Michigan was fixed for so long as men honor the man who works and the man who wins. Through many years of sacrifice and suffering this man worked with a holy zeal and died rich. A hundred thousand other lawyers would have dropped at the first defeat, or at the second. Thousands of other lawyers would have dawdled over the work, sat with their feet cocked up on desks, and discussed it with every loafer that came in, and finally dropped it for other work more immediately renumerative. Not so the kind of a lawyer that most honors his profession.

Few of us can have opportunities like those of Judge Douglas, and it is well that we do not, for few of us have the strength and the fortitude that he had; but there isn't a lawyer who reads these lines who can't learn a lesson from this instance, particularly the lawyer who gets to his office at 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning, who spends a good part of his day on the street or in social converse

with his neighbors in the office or out, and who spends no part of his evenings with his law books.

Then there is the eternal preparation for cases and clients yet to come. No man knows the emergencies of his life that may demand more knowledge, more skill, more preparation than he has made; and when they come he grieves, if he is a conscientious man, that he has allowed the hours and the days of the past to slip by unused, or has devoted them to frivolous amusements and weakening associations.

There is absolutely no excuse for an idle lawyer. The public knows this, and the public, particularly that of the country community, soon spots one. He is known by many characteristics. He is much of the time on the street; he is an active member of every group of unemployed, whether at a dog fight on the public square or a political controversy at the grocery or the shoemaker's; he is never in a hurry; he has time for anything and everything; his business is not a "jealous mistress," for if she were jealous there would be no living with her for him; his office has a convenient way of running itself; you can never tell when he will be there; he goes out and leaves the door open, and you may walk in and help yourself, and the chances are nobody in the office knows where he has gone or how long he will remain away; he is always needing a vacation; the idea of regularity and system is dreadful to him; the chances are that he holds himself above such things; office hours with him are an absurdity; he is superior to rule and regulation, and a law unto himself; there must be no artificial metes and bounds to his actions; if he chooses to wander out in the mid-afternoon, he has no use for a conscience that says "Thou shalt not;" he wants no reproachful rule adding to his discomforture on his return to find that a piece of business has flown in at one of his windows and out at another; system and regularity, and promptness-things which every business man knows to be necessary to success, are wholly unknown to him, or if known to him, are thoroughly beneath him.

Henry Clay, the greatest Speaker of our National House of Representatives, during fourteen years that he was Speaker, never had a decision reversed. He was so exact in business that he could send from Washington to Ashland for any document, telling in what pigeon hole it would be found,

Professional men are particularly prone to holding themselves above artificial regulations in the conduct of their business. They seem to have the idea that there are two classes of success rules; one for men generally, and the other for them; and yet every sensible man knows that the law of success is as inflexible as the law of nature, and that no man, whether a professional man or a non-professional man, can break that law in any of its particulars without suffering the consequences.

It is not the busy man who loses the note you sent him for collection. It is not the busy man who scrawls a two-line report on a case to an anxious client who has made repeated efforts in vain to obtain light. It is not the busy man who demands that all the world keep still while he reads his code of professional ethics, or some obsolete dictum that suits his purpose, or that takes position behind his lawless system of doing business, if system it may be called, and closes the incident by saying, "This is the rule of my office," and thereby thinks he has condoned the breach of courtesy, the plain infraction of a cardinal rule of business.

It is a well-known fact that if you want a thing well done you must employ a busy man. The chances are that the busy man is busy because he likes to be busy, wants to be busy, has work to keep him busy, and deserves it. The chances are that the man who isn't busy doesn't want to be busy, doesn't know how to be busy, has not friends and clients who think him capable of being busy. In this connection allow me to mention again the case of a lawyer in our city who died within the past year after having built up a splendid reputationa reputation that he thoroughly deserved. I never saw him on a case, I never heard him open his mouth in conversation, I never knew him personally. For years I saw him several times a week on the street cars, as our homes lay in the same section of the city and we traversed the same car line. I do not remember of ever having seen him without his having a book under his arm or in his hand. Nearly always it was a sheep-bound book-evidently a law book. Three times out of four he was reading it. I got the impression from frequently seeing him that he was a student and a hard worker. I came to know his reputation generally at the bar, and that was that he was a sound lawyer, and that his advice was constantly sought by other men, lawyers as well as laymen. After his death I read newspaper notices of his life, and in every case he was referred to as one of the soundest and best read lawyers in the state of Michigan. I am satisfied that he spent little of his time in frivolity, and that a large part of his life, aside from the ordinary working hours of the day, was spent in eternal preparation. He died well off in this world's goods and leaving a fine reputation behind him. He gave the impression of being busy to one who did not know him, and from my own observation of him I would have trusted him much sooner than I would have trusted the man who, from all appearances, has learned all the law he ever expects to learn,

From time to time there come before me complaints against lawyers whose names are printed in the law list published monthly in The American Legal News. I run across a great many of these high-toned lawyers-the kind who are above rules and are a system unto themselves. I asked one of

these fellows to return a note that had been sent to him for collection. He made no reply. I employed a brother lawyer in the same town to interview him. The report came that he claimed he had lost the note. There was no apology for failure to answer my inquiries or those of his client, no offer to reimburse the client for his loss nor me for my expense in hiring a lawyer friend to interview himno word of apology to offer. There I am left to make my peace as best I can with the client who took his name from the law list, and yet what I have done for him in the way of obtaining business for him is something which at least should have deserved passing recognition. Such treatment by one man of another in the non-professional business world would stamp the perpetrator of it as unworthy of credit, and in time blow him out of business, and it ought to be so in the professional world. Have we not a right to expect a higher kind of integrity in professional men than in men generally? As a rule they are educated men. As a rule they are looked up to in the community as men of a higher standard than the common herd. From their own study of the law they should be themselves the personfication, to some extent, of justice and right; and yet there are men doing business as lawyers-hundreds of them—and advertising for patronage in the law magazines and law lists, who, with their slack way of doing business, their indifference as to their moral and legal obligations, could not live a month in the avenues of general business.

I have, perhaps, said enough for this time, and yet I haven't said all that I wanted to say regarding this matter of work and the appearance of work. Really now, it cuts a very big figure in a man's success. If I were starting life again as a young lawyer I would set out with the idea that pockets were not made for holding hands. I would never be seen idling on the streets. If I went where men were I would go with a purpose, an earnest purpose, and not as a loafer. I would make it an inflexible rule always to be where I ought to be. I would as soon go to sleep in my office, or play cards there, or use my desk for a footstool, or make it the rendezvous of the "Do Nothing Club," as I would hang out a sign with the words

"WILLIAM C. SPRAGUE, Lawyer.

I Work When I Must."

(To be continued.)

In the February number we will begin the publication of questions and answers from the last Ohio Bar Examination, which will be followed by examinations from other states.

When William Frederick Howe died there passed away the last of a coterie of great criminal lawyers that made the bar of this city famous during the last half of the nineteenth century, says the New York Sun. For many years Mr. Howe, who founded the well-known firm of Howe & Hummel, was the peer, and in the opinion of many judges and lawyers the superior, of such great criminal lawyers as James T. Brady, Daniel Dougherty, John Graham, William A. Beach and many others. Mr. Howe was the only one of these great lawyers to survive the close of the nineteenth century, and during the last few years had practically retired from practice.

Each century brings, it has been said, a new type of man to almost every calling of life, to fit a new order of things and events. With the passing of William F. Howe so soon after the dawn of the new century there ceased to exist at the criminal bar of this city a lawyer of the old school. Even before his last few years at the bar, Mr. Howe saw gathered in the criminal courts of this city many young lawyers with new methods and new ideas. It is a matter for history to record whether the new school ever equaled the old one. It is safe to say that it will not be for many years, if ever, that the criminal bar will see the equal of him whom all called "Howe the lawyer." His school was the old school, and the old will ever, in the opinion of many persons, be the best.

During nearly fifty years at the bar Mr. Howe helped the courts and the Legislature in making and building up the criminal law. It has been said that he received retainers in 1,000 homicide cases. The records of the office of Howe & Hummel show that he acted as counsel for 650 murderers. Almost from his introduction to the bar of this city in 1858, Mr. Howe, by his brilliant talents and profound legal learning, took a foremost place among the criminal lawyers. He was eloquent, humorous and pathetic, a powerful pleader. He was frequently moved to tears by his own eloquence and wept as he drew tears from the eyes of jurors.

Once, many years ago, so runs one of the stories told of Weeping Bill, as Howe was frequently called, an assistant district attorney, while summing up to a jury, warned the men on it not to be swayed from their duty by Weeping Bill Howe's tears.

Mr. Howe, it is said, arose and exclaimed: "A man who ridicules me for weeping at the sorrows of this prisoner-a man charged with the murder of a woman-whether the prisoner is guilty or innocent, is sure to come to a bad end."

Several years afterward Mr. Howe was reminded

of the incident and was asked if his prediction had come true and if the assistant district attorney had come to a bad end.

"Alas, yes!" exclaimed Mr. Howe, "a most fearfully bad end."

"What was it?" eagerly exclaimed several of those who heard him and saw the ever ready tears appear in the lawyers eyes.

"He-he-" said Mr. Howe, in a sad and hesitating tone of voice, "is now trying cases for a soulless railroad corporation—a sad, sad end to come to."

Mr. Howe, was most successful in captivating jurors by his genial appearance and keen wit. He frequently held court and jury spellbound by the beautiful creations and fancies of his fertile imagination. He frequently and most aptly quoted Shakespeare. Mr. Howe believed that, as the law presumed a man to be innocent until his guilt had been established, a lawyer was justified in using every lawful method to bring about his client's acquittal. Things done for effect on the jury often had an amusing and unexpected ending, as was instanced in the case of a man on trial for the murder of Commodore Voorhis, president of the Brooklyn Yacht Club.

Mr. Howe defended the prisoner successfully. His defense was that the man was insane and a victim of epilepsy. The prisoner sat in the court room with a bandage tied around his head and looked the picture of misery and insanity during all the days of the trial. When the verdict of acquittal was announced the prisoner, to Mr. Howe's disgust, jumped up and pulled the bandage off his head, saying that he was all right.

Another story is told of Mr. Howe's tears while pleading for a client's life or liberty. At one session of the court, while Recorder Hackett was presiding, Mr. Howe had succeeded by his eloquence, aided by his tears, in obtaining in rapid succession the acquittal of several men charged with homicide. The recorder was somewhat disgruntled. During the trial of another homicide case the alleged wife of the prisoner sat with a baby on her lap. While Mr. Howe was pleading for his client's acquittal, he was seen to scowl at the mother. She gazed at him in blank amazement. Mr. Howe stopped and moved close up to the mother and the baby. Suddenly the baby began to cry. Mr. Howe also wept. The baby's cries almost immediately subsided, Recorder Hackett looked up with a smile and remarked: "Mr. Howe, you had better give the baby another jab with a pin."

In telling this story, as he frequently did, Mr. Howe said:

"That remark of the recorder's about the jab of the pin won a hopeless case for me, for I used it against him for all it was worth."

Mr. Howe was always on the alert for some incident on which to turn a hopeless case in his favor. One of his most phenomenal victories, in his own opinion, was the case of Ella Nelson, a young girl charged with murder in the first degree. She shot the full contents of a six-barreled revolver into the body of the man whose mistress she had been and who tried to discard her. The girl was put on trial before the stoical Recorder Smyth. The then district attorney refused to accept Mr. Howe's offer of a plea of murder in the second degree, which Ella was anxious to interpose.

The girl was put on trial for her life, and it was a trifling incident that enabled Mr. Howe to turn the tide in her favor. The cross-examination by the district attorney disclosed the fact that in the pocket of the dead man was found a letter from another woman begging him to come and visit her and to continue their illicit relations.

This letter was couched in very amatory terms, and the prosecution tried, after bringing out the fact of the existence of the letter, which was news to Mr. Howe, to exclude it. Realizing the effect that he could produce with the letter, Mr. Howe insisted on its production before the jury. Recorder Smyth permitted Mr. Howe to read the letter to the jury. Word for word, in measured, solemn tones, the lawyer made every word of the letter tell with thrilling effect.

In talking of the case recently, Mr. Howe said: "You must see the strength of my position when I tell you that the district attorney had prepared the jury to believe that the man whom Ella Nelson had shot had been weaned from his wife by the defendant, and had been, by her machinations and threats, prevented from returning to his family. Well do I remember rounding in its fullest meaning a sentence to the jury. This man died with a wilful lie in his mouth and a written lie in his pocket.'"

In addressing the jury in the girl's behalf Mr. Howe did his usual dramatic by-play. The prisoner was seated with her head buried between her hands. Suddenly Mr. Howe turned around and without the slightest warning to her, made his dramatic byplay. He seized her wrists, quickly pulled her arms apart, distended so that the girl's tear-stained features were exposed, and exclaimed: "Look in these features, proclaiming a broken heart!"

This picture of the frightened girl, her face an ashy hue, deluged with tears, was a climax the jury could not withstand, and they returned a verdict of acquittal,

Whenever he had an opportunity, Mr. Howe used

children in court for the purpose of touching the hearts of jurors.

One of his greatest victories, the saving of Edward Unger from the hangman's noose, was largely through his use of a child.

He

Unger killed his lodger, a man named Boles, for the purpose of obtaining possession of Boles' bank book. Unger murdered his lodger by smashing in his skull with a hammer. He then hid the body under his (Unger's) bed, in which bed his son slept that night. After the boy had left the house, Unger cut off the head from the body, took it to the East river and threw it off of a ferryboat. He then returned home, cut off the legs and arms, and sent them and the body of Boles to Baltimore in a box. Supt. Byrnes, on looking over the belongings of the murdered man, found a card bearing his name. traced the man to Unger's home and induced Unger to make a confession. Supt. Byrnes said on the day Unger's trial began that Unger's grave was dug and his coffin made. It was not believed that Unger could possibly escape the gallows, but Mr. Howe made one of his extraordinary defenses. He asserted that Boles had struck Unger first, and that Unger, seeing a hammer near at hand, seized it and, using it as a weapon of self-defense, resisted Boles' attack, and finally, in fear of his life, struck Boles and killed him. Mr. Howe, with much dramatic force, described Unger's remorse and told how Unger had hid the body under his bed for fear his son would see it.

"They slept over the dead body, it is true," exclaimed Mr. Howe, "but what a night it must have been for Unger!"

Then came Mr. Howe's most effective appeal to the jury. He exclaimed:

"Gentlemen of the jury, Edward Unger did not cut the dead man's head off. He did not mutilate the body. He did not throw the head from the ferryboat under the paddle wheels. He did not put the dilapidated and mangled trunk in a box and send it to Baltimore." Mr. Howe suddenly ceased talking. The jury and the spectators seemed paralyzed with amazement. Judge Barrett, who presided, seemed astonished, for Unger had previously on the witness stand admitted that he had done all the things that Mr. Howe had just asserted he had not done. After working the jurors up to this great state of excited expectancy, Mr. Howe turned his eyes fully upon Unger, who sat with his seven-yearold daughter on his knees. She was a pretty child, with golden hair and large blue eyes. She, with a happy smile on her face, ignorant of the dread ordeal, was engaged in playing with her father's gray hair.

Mr. Howe pointed at the child, and after a long pause exclaimed in a subdued tone:

"Look at that little girl. Oh! She cut off that head: she mutilated that body. It was not Unger.

Yes! 'Twas she, 'twas she. Mr. Unger could not bear the thought of having it said, with that beauteous girl living, that he, her father, had committed so horrible a deed, and, therefore, when in a moment it occurred to him that he could hide the deed which had been perpetrated, he mutilated the body. It was the thought of that little girl which caused him to do it, and therefore I say it was she that did it, not him."

The effect in court of the child, of Mr. Howe's tear-stained face, his wonderfully sweet voice, and the picture was electrical, and instead of convicting Unger of murder in the first degree the jury convicted him of manslaughter, and Unger was sentenced to state prison for twenty years.

It seems difficult to those who never came under the influence of Mr. Howe's voice and eloquence to realize that such victories could be achieved by any lawyer, and it will be many a day before his equal is seen again.

So remarkable were his victories that judges were amazed and told the great lawyer in open court, and jurors, that prisoners should not have been acquitted or let off so easily.

The late Justice Smyth, who for many years held the office of recorder and as Recorder Smyth was the terror of all criminals, presided at the trial of a Bruto Calegero, whom Mr. Howe saved from the electric chair. Recorder Smyth said at the conclusion of the trial:

"Before proceeding to sentence this prisoner, I desire to say to you, Mr. Howe, that he is indebted to you for the position in which he stands to-day. You saved his life. How it was that you succeeded in convincing a jury of twelve intelligent men that this man was only guilty of the crime of manslaughter in the first degree is something beyond my comprehension, except this, that I do know that you are the ablest lawyer at the bar of this or any other criminal court, as you have succeeded in inducing this jury to believe that this man killed the deceased in the heat of passion by means of a dangerous weapon, without any design on his part to kill."

Recorder Smyth then turned to the prisoner and said: "The evidence in this case satisfies my mind. that you were guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree, and that you were saved from the conviction of that degree of crime is solely to be attributed to your counsel."

In a letter dated April 26, 1892, the late Judge Noah Davis wrote to Mr. Howe concerning the case of the People vs. Webster: "As a judge I feel free to say that your speech is not only creditable but powerful. Some portions of it are touchingly eloquent, and taken as a whole it is one of the most effective addresses of its kind I have read in many a year. I know little or nothing of the merits of the case, and therefore speak only of the merits

of the argument.

As the 'Father of the Criminal Bar' of our city you have vindicated your title, and long may you live to enjoy it."

Many amusing stories are told of Mr. Howe's experience with criminals. Several years ago he was held up by two footpads on a dark night. While one of the men was going through his pockets Mr. Howe exclaimed:

"Dickey the Brute, I didn't think this of you after all I have done for you." The man addressed peered into the lawyer's face and exclaimed, "Why, you're Howe the lawyer."

The fellow turned to his companion and said: "Let him go, Jack; you will want him to lie for you some day as hard as he did for me when he got me off twenty years sure."

Mr. Howe, with a smile on his face, recently told what he said was the greatest compliment he had ever had paid to him by a client. He said that a few weeks after he had secured the acquittal of a man on a charge of burglary, the man sent for him, telling him he was once more in the Tombs Prison. "I went to see him," said Mr. Howe, "and asked him what he was doing in jail again, after promising me he would never commit another crime." (Mr. Howe smiled as he said "commit another crime."). The man said:

"Well, you see, Mr. Howe, I enjoyed your speech so much last time, and it did me so much damned good to see you knock out that lying district attorney, that I just couldn't keep my word to you."

It was not only in the courts and among lawyers and judges that genial Bill Howe was known. He was a familiar sight and a well known character at the theatre, the race track, and in all places where men of genial habits are accustomed to gather. He loved all that was beautiful in nature and all the sparkle and glitter of the artificial life as well. He wore loud clothes and many diamonds because, he said, he liked brightness and glitter. Although nearly 75 years old when he died, he was of a sunny and happy disposition and loved to keep in touch with the latest events in the sporting, social and theatrical worlds.

When asked shortly before his death to what he attributed his great success with jurors. Mr. Howe said: "I kept in touch with human nature. I appealed to the jurors as men. I endeavored to bring them close in touch with human weakness and human frailties. When I had a desperate case I tried to make each juror stand in the position of the prisoner when he committed the crime, to make the hearts of the jurors boil with the same temptations that actuated the person to feel as he did. When I had done that the rest was easy, for human nature is the same at all times, in all ages."

This may all be true, but few men understood human nature as did "Howe the lawyer," and when his body was lowered into its grave there passed