,
and acted with a far-seeing wisdom as rare as the courage which
accompanied it. Of course, I assume that you are going into the
profession for the purpose of becoming a lawyer, and not a mere
conductor of legal strifes. If you are, you must deny yourself.

Self-denial is the price of strength, as any college athlete will
tell you. Self-denial is the road to wealth, as any banker will tell
you. Self-denial is the method of all excellencies, as all human
experience will tell you. But this is moralizing.

I do not mean that you should decline small cases. By no means. Take a
five-dollar case, and work with the same sincerity that you would on a
fifty-thousand-dollar case. "Despise not the day of small things." In
selecting your business, I refer to the quality, and not the
magnitude, of cases. Again, again, and still again, this counsel: Care
for your small case with the same painstaking labor you bestow upon a
large one.

Never lose sight of the fact that your greatest reward is not your
fee, but the doing of a perfect piece of work. The same fervor and
ideality should govern your labors in a lawsuit that inspire and
control the great artist and inventor. A distinguished sculptor said
to me one evening:

"I wish the matter of compensation could be wiped out of my
consideration. I must give it attention for obvious reasons, but it is
the matter of least moment to me, and has absolutely no influence upon
my work."

It is no wonder that that man achieved an immortal renown at
thirty-seven. Doctor Barker, the recent occupant of the Chair of
Anatomy in the University of Chicago, recently elected to an even more
notable position in the Johns Hopkins University, who has won for
himself a permanent place in the high seats of his profession by his
work on neurology, was in a company one evening. Said one of his
admirers:

"Why don't you go into practise? You could easily make a great fortune
before you are forty."

Listen to the answer: "Money does not interest me."

We all remember Agassiz's famous reply to a proposition to deliver one
lecture for a large fee: "I must decline, gentlemen; I have no time to
make money." That was why he was Agassiz.

Quite as lofty ideals should inspire the work of those who make their
vows to the greatest of all sciences, the science of justice, and the
greatest of all arts, the art of adjusting the rights of men. No
lawyer can become great who does not resolve, at the beginning of e