h whom
you are studying to let you draft pleadings, take depositions, examine
witnesses, make arguments to court and jury, get out transcripts for
appeal, write briefs, petitions, motions, and all the rest of that
careful and painstaking work which makes the daily life of the lawyer,
you will equip yourself for actual practise better than in any other
way I know of.

The firm will gladly let you do this work if you show yourself
competent. But this does not mean that you are merely to sit around
the office and say "bright things." There is nothing in "bright
things"--there is everything in good judgment and downright hard work.

In active practise never forget that you are a sworn officer of
justice quite as much as is the judge on the bench. It is impossible
for you to put your ideals of your profession too high or to attach
yourself to them too firmly. I am no admirer of the acidulous
character of John Adams (not that he was not both great and good,
however, for he was--but he was too sour), yet he announced a great
thing, and lived up to it, when he declared that he was practising law
for the purposes of justice first and a living afterward. (But, then,
John Adams announced many great things; and what he announced he lived
up to. He was supremely honest.)

"Never take a case," said Horace Mann, "unless you believe your client
is right and his cause is just." On the contrary, Lord Brougham
declared that "the conscientious lawyer must be at the service of the
criminal as well as of the state." And this great lawyer proceeds to
argue with characteristic ability that it is as much the duty of the
lawyer to work for the cause he knows to be wrong as for the cause he
knows to be right.

Briefly, the reason is that it is the very essence of justice that
every man shall have his day in court; that the attorney is but the
trained and educated mouthpiece of his client; and that to refuse the
cause of a client in which the attorney does not believe is to
relegate all the controversies to the judge in the first instance,
which, of course, would render the administration of practical justice
impossible.

This is the prevailing practise of our profession, and it is a serious
thing to question its correctness. Its ethics are as wide as they are
ingenious, and when one beholds them through the medium of the great
Englishman's wonderful argument they seem radiant with aggressive
truth. Nevertheless, I am almost of opinion that