Tribute of bon. Oscar S. Straus.

Er-Minister to Turkey.

When the newspapers several months ago, brought the report that Professor Dwight had sent in his resignation as warden and professor of the Law School of Columbia College, because of certain differences between him and the trustees of the College in respect to the future scope and management of the school, this information was received with surprise by the public, and by the graduates of the school throughout the country with a feeling of deep concern and sincere regret, mingled with the hope that such report might not be true.

The cause of this regret was not abstract, but personal, for every student of the Law School carried away with him an earnest and most profound attachment and esteem for Dr. Dwight. They had sat “not at his feet" after the manner of the ancients, but they sat literally on the same level with him, for this was his peculiar tact, that he lifted all his students up to his high plane. Every member of the Law School had in Professor Dwight not alone a most inimitable instructor but a friend and adviser. The pleasant relations between student and professor began at the beginning of every academic year, for Professor Dwight had the remarkable personality faculty of immediately learning his name, and ever afterwards remembering it correctly. I will not attempt to describe the many extraordinary qualities that Professor Dwight combines, and which have made him the great professor that he is. In brief, I would say that he fulfilled to the fullest extent the requisites as laid down by Dr. Watts: "Instructors should not only be skilful in those sciences which they teach, but have skill in the method of teaching and patience in the practice."

It will not be denied that the law is as intricate, complex and difficult as any of the sciences. It abounds in fine distinctions and differentiations, and requires a logic circumscribed often by apparently contradictory precedents to discover the underlying principles around which these precedents are grouped, and by which they are often overlapped as the hanging branches overshadow the small clear stream that meanders underneath.

With wonderful clearness and facility the Professor would explain to

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