HON. OSCAR S. STRAUS.

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the unskilled minds of the students the principles that govern a specified line of decision, and teach them to sift the facts by the light of the law, and to thread their way from decision to precedent and from precedent to principles.

Professor Dwight has contributed more largely towards lifting the study of the law from chaos to a systematic method than any other instructor of our time. By reason of his great learning in the law, and his ability and skill as an instructor, Columbia Law School has justly won for itself the first rank among the schools of that class in the country. There are several thousand lawyers dispersed all over the country who feel a deep sense of affection and gratitude to Professor Dwight for the help he has given them in equipping them for the arduous duties of their profession, men who are an honor to their profession and reflect credit upon the name of Columbia. This fact is doubtless well known to the Trustees of the College, who, I trust, have no lack of appreciation for the service that Professor Dwight has rendered to the institution, by whose efforts mainly the school has been built up from a small insignificant class, to one of the largest and best known of the adjunct schools, so that with the prestige it has acquired and its large number of students it will be comparatively easy to extend its scope and enlarge its curriculum.

The graduates of the school are doubtless pleased that an advancing and progressive step is contemplated. This is a move in the right direction and in keeping with the progress and general improvement that has been so vigorously inaugurated under the new régime of the College. A thorough course of instruction in law, municipal and international, its philosophy and history, as distinguished from a preparation for the practice of the law, is of the highest use as branches of general education in a country such as ours, where there is need for many men systematically trained for statecraft and legislative duties. I am confident that the graduates of the Law School would have felt better contented if this enlargement of the scope of the school could have been carried forward under the wardenship of Professor Dwight, whose eminent qualifications as an instructor would serve as an inestimable object lesson to such associate professors and instructors as may be called to the school to undertake the work which has been by him so well begun and for so many years continued with such distinguished and extraordinary success.

Professor Dwight can be assured that he carries with him to his retirement from his arduous duties and long years of distinguished services the universal esteem and highest regard of his many students throughout the land, who will ever recognize a deep debt of gratitude to their great and wise professor.

NEW YORK, April 30, 1891,

Tribute of Judge William H. DeWitt.

Supreme Court of Montana.

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to add my tribute to the thousands which are rendered to Dr. Dwight upon his retirement from his active duties at Columbia College Law School.

It has not been my privilege to even meet Dr. Dwight since, shortly after being graduated, I had his kindly God-speed in starting for a country then as distant from New York as is now the Congo Free State, a country which, even the other day, was criticised in Boston as a remote mining camp unfit to be a State.

But, in a somewhat varied experience of a dozen years, in seeing a noble commonwealth grow from a small group of mining communities, and during a slight participation in the making of a State, no influence has been more potent or present in my life than that of the two years' instruction of Dr. Dwight.

My memory runs toward him in three channels. The first is that through which go the thoughts of all his students, his magnificent system of instruction. It meets a response with his pupils to say that in his instruction he laid a foundation of principles upon which he afterwards developed to the student the superstructure of cases which has been built upon them. The terse and expressive condensations, which we call maxims, and the underlying principles of the law, he planted in the student's mind and tilled with daily applications to varying facts, until they took a root as lasting as life itself.

The writer of this letter happens to have had his lot cast where a new common law upon two subjects has, within a few years, been developed that is the Western American law of mines and water rights. This is not the place to discuss or even define the radical departures from the ancient law of real estate which have been taken in the matter of mining and the use of water in the Western States. They are departures required by geological and climatic facts, and by the allpowerful necessities of a people-a people who, under their wagon bows, along with their rifles and picks and shovels, brought their fathers' common law, the everlasting principles of which they adapted to a new

JUDGE WILLIAM H. DEWITT.

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environment-principles which Dr. Dwight made household words to those who sat under his instruction. There is one of his students, of the class of 1878, to whom, in the endeavor to solve the ever-recurring legal problems, often comes a thought, with the accompaniment of "as Dwight used to say."

Another of my happiest recollections of that great teacher is his high moral view of the profession. Banter upon lawyers' lack of integrity is common upon the lips of laymen. It is a stock joke of the stage. It is good-naturedly tolerated in the profession. With Dr. Dwight it was wholly absent. I do not remember his ever indulging in humor, the subject of which was the sometimes alleged moral weakness of the members of the profession. He taught us not only law, but law morals. He impressed us with a belief that the law was the most honorable of all callings in life, a belief which the vicissitudes of experience have not shaken from the soil in which he planted it.

There is one other memory of Dr. Dwight's history in the law school which is near to the hearts of many of his students, and of which I, in common with others, can speak with grateful remembrance. Many of us relied upon tutoring and coaching law-school students, conditioned in Latin, in order to supply certain sumptuary demands of nature and an artificial civilization. Dr. Dwight did more than give us letters of recommendation. He found us work, and took pleasure in doing it. Hundreds of his students owe to his interest and efforts the fact that they found the means by which they were enabled to prosecute their studies.

I can look back to many other instructors whom I admired and respected, but Dr. Dwight occupies the higher place of teacher and friend.

He has built himself a monument in the hearts of his pupils. Its foundation rises from every State in the Union. May it be many years before its cap-piece is placed, and the end shall crown the work.

HELENA, MONTANA, April 22, 1891.

Tribute of William P. Fowler.

President New York, Ontario, and Western Railroad.

It is said of Judge Joseph Story "that his familiar bearing toward 'the boys' as he called the students,—his frankness, bubbling humor, merry and contagious laugh, and inexhaustible fund of incident and anecdote, with which he gave piquancy and zest to the driest themes, won for him the love of his pupils, whose professional careers, after they left the Harvard Law School, he watched with fatherly interest.”

How truly these words apply to the work of Professor Dwight, those who have been "his boys" can bear witness.

The daily sessions at Columbia Law School have been for many years not only hours of profit but hours of pleasure. Under Professor Dwight, there were no dry themes, and, after the daily lecture, what a pleasure it always was to come in familiar contact with one who, beyond doubt or question, was the earnest and devoted friend of each and every man whose good fortune it was to attend those sessions. Nor did his fatherly interest end at the class-room door. Each young man, in starting out, with the Law School behind him, the world before him, and his diploma in his pocket, felt that he was still one of Professor Dwight's "boys," and that his record had a place somewhere "in the heart of a friend."

A brilliant chapter in the history of Columbia Law School is about to close. The man who made it successful and renowned is to transfer its cares and responsibilities—which, to him, have been a sacred trust— to other able, but younger, men.

May we not, with propriety, at this time, quote Judge Story's own words, and confess that "we dwell with pleasure upon the entirety of a life adorned by consistent principles and filled up in the discharge of virtuous duty, where there is nothing to regret and nothing to conceal ; no friendships broken; no confidence betrayed; no timid surrenders to popular clamor; no eager reaches for popular favor. May the period be yet far distant when praise shall speak out, with that fulness of utterance which belongs to the sanctity of the grave."

Professor Dwight will carry with him, in retiring, the esteem and affection of hundreds of men, each of whom is a better, wiser man for having been one of "his boys."

NEW YORK, April 8, 1891.