" he exclaimed, "I am moved!" It is seldom that heartier, truer
friendships come to a man than came to Lincoln in the course of his
life. On the other hand, no one ever deserved better of his fellow-men
than he did; and it is pleasant to know that such brotherly aid as
Butler and Speed were able to give him, offered in all sincerity and
accepted in a spirit that left no sense of galling obligation on either
side, helped the young lawyer over present difficulties and made it
possible for him to keep on in the career he had marked out for himself.

The lawyer who works his way up from a five-dollar fee in a suit before
a justice of the peace, to a five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme
Court of his State, has a long and hard path to climb. Lincoln
climbed this path for twenty-five years, with industry, perseverance,
patience--above all, with that self-control and keen sense of right and
wrong which always clearly traced the dividing line between his duty to
his client and his duty to society and truth. His perfect frankness
of statement assured him the confidence of judge and jury in every
argument. His habit of fully admitting the weak points in his case
gained him their close attention to his strong ones, and when clients
brought him questionable cases his advice was always not to bring suit.

"Yes," he once said to a man who offered him such a case; "there is
no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can set a
whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can distress a widowed mother
and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain for you six hundred
dollars, which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to them as
it does to you. I shall not take your case, but I will give you a little
advice for nothing. You seem a sprightly, energetic man. I would advise
you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way."

He would have nothing to do with the "tricks" of the profession, though
he met these readily enough when practised by others. He never knowingly
undertook a case in which justice was on the side of his opponent. That
same inconvenient honesty which prompted him, in his store-keeping
days, to close the shop and go in search of a woman he had innocently
defrauded of a few ounces of tea while weighing out her groceries, made
it impossible for him to do his best with a poor case. "Swett," he once
exclaimed, turning suddenly to his associate, "the man is guilty; you
defend hi