Tribute of Morris W. Seymour.

As a teacher, Dr. Theodore Woolsey Dwight is known and loved by thousands of the legal profession in all parts of the country, but as highly and justly as he is esteemed in that character, it is as a jurist that his reputation will live in the years to come. To such as have had the benefit of his instruction, it is a matter of perhaps selfish congratulation, that he has resisted the numerous opportunities that have been offered him of judicial preferment, but when one reads the learned and discriminating opinions written by him, as one of the Commissioners of Appeals, in the 57th, 61st, and 65th volumes of the New York Reports, it seems a misfortune that the science of law should have been deprived of so learned and able an expounder. In the 178 cases reported in these volumes, Dr. Dwight writes concurring and dissenting opinions in 68. Both time and space forbid an extended review of these decisions. It so happens that but few of these involve questions which will mark them as "leading cases"; but they present for consideration an unusual variety of questions, and for their proper disposition require the discussion of a large number of legal principles. Such, for example, as the interpretation and construction of the manufacturing act of 1848, the conveyance made by religious societies, the extending of the law of trade-marks to the protection of business names, the discussion of the limited-liability and removal acts of Congress as affecting the jurisdiction of State courts. Where can one find the qualifications and limitations properly applicable to the distinction between servant and contractor more carefully pointed out, than in the dissenting opinion in McCafferty against Railroad, or the subject of barratry more learnedly discussed than in Atkinson against Insurance Company? The review of the rules applicable to that section of the statute of frauds, which require the sale of goods in certain cases to be evidenced in writing, in Cooke against Millard, is a contribution to the law upon that subject for which all lawyers, no matter where practising, will be grateful. The same is equally true of numerous decisions pertaining to negotiable paper, especially as affected by its theft, forgery, and loss; of equitable conversion, of dower, of partnership, and the covenant of quiet enjoyment. It may be truthfully said of substantially all

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these opinions that they are monographs, exhausting the particular subject under discussion. We doubt whether, in any reports, a greater amount of learning is anywhere condensed into an equal number of pages.

It is, however, to the picture drawn in these opinions, and all the more powerfully, because unconsciously and unintentionally drawn, of the just and learned judge, that we call particular attention to them. One sees between the lines of the printed page the working of a trained mind, intent on finding out first how the particular case ought to be decided, that right may prevail; next, how that object is to be obtained without overriding any principle of law, the preservation of which is of vastly more consequence than the particular case in hand; and lastly, the mind, alert to discriminate between sophistry and truth, the husk and the kernel, the things that the law, if it would remain a science, must slough off, and those it must guard as eternal.

Bridgeport, CT., April 22, 1891.

Tribute of Henry R. Beekman.

Few are fortunate enough to witness the full fruition of the labors of a busy life spent in intellectual work. Especially is this true of the educator, whose efforts are addressed to the mental training of those whose success or failure in the activities of life within the measure of a generation can alone be appealed to as evidence of their intellectual equipment.

Among these favored few Professor Dwight enjoys the rare privilege of being ranked. During the period of thirty years which span his service in the School of Law of Columbia College, he has seen young men whom he has trained for a professional career, and inspired with enthusiasm for the science to which he was devoted, practising their profession with success and attaining the highest honors which the Law can bestow upon her faithful votaries. They are to be found conspicuous among the younger leaders of the Bar; on the benches of our highest courts; in legislative assemblies, and other departments of the public service. The habits of investigation, the logical processes of reasoning, and facility in sifting facts and marshalling them in their proper relations, which characterize the successful lawyer, fit him especially for the duties of public life, and it is, therefore, inevitable that, in its pursuit, he should distance all other competitors in a country where rapid rotation in office is the rule and special training for public affairs is utterly discouraged.

The influence, therefore, upon public as well as private affairs, which those exercise whose privilege it is to expound the great science of human affairs, is far-reaching and profound, and the responsibility they assume correlatively great.

It is for the great ability and conscientiousness which he brought to the discharge of this responsibility, and the widespread usefulness and importance of the results of his life-work, that Professor Dwight's name will always arrest attention and command respect.

To us, now reaching the milestone of middle life and looking back to the days spent in his lecture room, the recollections are of the brightest and kindliest. His treatment of the students was dignified and marked by extreme courtesy. The love for his profession was so intense that it was an unconscious emanation which sympathetically affected

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those who came within the sphere of his influence. He claimed for it all its ancient prestige as an honorable profession which was degraded by its pursuit exclusively for its emoluments.

The methods of instruction which he adopted seem to me now, even more than at the time I was pursuing them, to have been particularly happy. The daily recitation from the text-book gave occasion for the running comment of the Professor, in which the reason for each legal principle was justified by logical necessity, or by some consideration of public policy, or by appeals to historical evidences of its origin in political conditions or exigencies of a bygone age. The history of the development of a rule of law, its modifications and exceptions, were illustrated by the citation of and comment upon reported cases in which they found embodiment, and this exposition would be fittingly crowned by some pithy phrase, or by one of those wonderful maxims of the law he was so fond of citing, which gave the very essence of the doctrine and fastened it for all time in the minds of his hearers. The attention of the student was thus directed to the constructive processes by which the body of our law has been built up as the occasions of the people demanded. He came to know not only what the law was, but why it was so, and was thus prepared to apply it with intelligence and in harmony with that principle of natural development which is the life of the common law.

Few who have enjoyed the privilege of sitting under the instruction of Professor Dwight have failed to recognize the value to them in their professional careers of the rich stores of learning which he so freely offered for their acceptance. There are none surely who at some time have not felt their difficulties vanish with the recollection of some principle explained and applied in his lecture room.

Professor Dwight is entitled to the proud distinction of having established in this great city the first school in which the the study of the law was pursued on scientific principles. The renown which the Law School of Columbia College has justly won throughout the country is his. The attraction, which it exerted in drawing its army of students to its classes sprang from his personal qualities and methods as an instructor, and it is due to him that at this great centre of influence, "reading law" has become the study of a system of jurisprudence.

NEW YORK, April 21, 1891.

Tribute of Gen. Henry Edwin Tremain.

A few words about one of the famous litigations in which Dr. Dwight was a prominent figure.

Selected by the parties as referee in the case of Marie and others against Garrison, he was called upon to weigh a complicated state of circumstances including many other lawsuits connected with the extensive controversy of which the case before him was an essential branch. The plaintiffs claimed an agreement under which they were as stockholders to desist from defending the foreclosure of a dubious mortgage on the Pacific Railroad of Missouri; and the defendant Garrison was to buy in that railroad property, to re-organize its corporation on a stipulated basis, and to apportion to the plaintiffs their stock equivalents in the new organization. The defendant Garrison having consequently foreclosed, did purchase and re-organize, but omitted to recognize the plaintiffs' stock, and denied any obligation to do so.

The foreclosure itself was peculiar in many features. It proceeded upon the non-payment of the first interest due under a fresh mortgage made by the same Board that caused the default; while the default itself occurred at a time when the mortgagor road was earning not only interest but dividends. The mortgage bonds had been absorbed by the same directors who acted as directors of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company; an insolvent corporation whose directors had acquired the control of the Pacific Railroad of Missouri. A lease was the device resorted to by which the two roads were linked under the same governing individuals who constituted themselves into the two separate Boards of Directors; and with whom the defendant Garrison was operating. Under these auspices, together with the further guise of a worthless dividend guarantee by the insolvent road on a new issue of stock by the Pacific Railroad of Missouri, a large speculation and investment was induced in that stock then selling at an apparently low price.

By the time the public were sufficiently "let in" and the new issue fairly popularized, the mortgage had been created, and bonds under it furtively issued. Default in the first interest speedily followed, with swift foreclosure proceedings effectively pursued. The slightest active opposition or noise would necessarily have thwarted the scheme. Thus it came about that the Garrison agreement to protect the plaintiffs' interest was relied upon on the one hand, and was resisted on the other