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with cordiality, had he not shown these degraded tastes. As it was, they had no more courtesy for him than for Stephens, believing the judge to have disgraced his office.

It was the effort of the lawyers of North Carolina, in those days, to avoid close contact with the populace and to preserve an esprit de corps. They believed that their only associates, on terms of equality, should be of their own order, as the clergy or medical profession, representing an educated aristocracy. The masses were illiterate, unpolished and, in the estimation of the lawyers, unfit for companionship with the cultivated classes, whose policy it was to inspire the plain people with profound respect for their superiors.

The statements here made of early ideas and feelings, largely result from conversations with Col. Thomas Ruffin, a man of aristocratic lineage and unusual powers of mind. He was a son of the late Chief Justice Ruffin, of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and afterward himself was an associate justice of that eminent tribunal. He informed me of the sentiment among the lawyers against Tourgee, because of his intimacy with Stephens. And once, when as a matter of course, with my New York education, I had offered to make oath to an affidavit, in a Caswell county lawsuit, wherein I was associated with Col. Ruffin, he advised me against it, and said it had been the custom, in North Carolina, for lawyers never to be sworn, in the conduct of their cases, it being considered that their mere word was sufficient; and so, as I afterward understood, the judges generally so regarded it.

Any one can see, however, the mischiefs which might occur from such a custom; as, after the verbal statements of lawyers, disputes might arise as to what had been said, and no one would be able to decide, and no one would try to do so, for fear of a quarrel. Happily the people, in spite of the traditions of slavery, are rapidly emerging from their blind gropings, as an outcome of the freedom thrust upon them by the civil war, and the younger members of the legal profession now aid in the work of educating the illiterate, knowing that it is better for the commonwealth that all should be taught.

The social conditions existing in North Carolina in the early days mentioned, may help to explain the intense bitterness manifested on all occasions toward men like Stephens. He was of humble parentage, but had been put forward by Governor Holden