words.

XVI

Judge Leslie returned on the following day, and, sending for Gwynne at
once, announced that he was ready to settle down for the winter. A
partner attended to the business of the office, and the judge shut
himself up with Gwynne in the large light room containing his fine law
library, and examined his promising pupil. Gwynne was well read in the
English Common Law, and in Comparative Jurisprudence, particularly in
the history of treaties and the comity of nations. So much he had
regarded as necessary to the education of a future cabinet minister.

Judge Leslie sketched out a course of study which embraced Cooley and
Kent on Constitutional Law, compilations of Leading Cases, Story on
Contracts, the California Codes, Civil, Penal, and Political, and
Corporation Law. "The money is in the last," he remarked, dryly, "but
even if you never succumb to these monstrous corporations, more aptly
named cormorants, the more you know about their methods and needs the
better, should you ever be called upon to fight them; and I have an idea
that that is just where you will show your strength. All the great
statesmen of this country have been great lawyers, and the great
statesman of the future is going to be the lawyer that checks the power
of unscrupulous capital, without at the same time delivering the country
over to the mercies of that equally unscrupulous tyranny the
labor-union. There is a solution somewhere and some man is going to find
it. I don't see why you should not be the man. I have followed your
career very carefully--you have always interested me. You come here with
a magnificent political training, a mind uncorrupted by a lifetime of
contact with the contemptible methods of machine politics, and a really
great ambition. Your eyes are wide open. I don't see why you should make
any mistakes, particularly as you have four good years in which to
ponder the great question before committing yourself. Four years are a
long span. No man can tell what may happen in that time, what new party
may evolve. All you can do is to watch events and be ready for the
forelock when time shakes it at you. If it so happens that you can
insidiously mould a new party meanwhile, so much the better. The wisest
and most suggestive writer on our national life is a Briton. I see no
reason why England should not send us a statesman--in the old sense. God
knows, all that we have now are a bitter disappointment to those of us
wi