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��EULOGY OF DANIEL M. CHRISTIE.
��ing right and enforcing justice in civilized society was unbounded. For many years previous to his death he must have been the greatest living ex- positor among us of the Common Law of England, which Lord Coke called " the perfection of reason." He did not take kindly to the modern codes of prac- tice, which, in his opinion, degraded the study of the law from a science to a trade, the tools of which any rude and untrained hand might wield. Nor was he in love any the more with the systems of Equity, which during the last fifty years have so much usurped the province and superseded, whether or not they have enlarged, the uses of the Common Law, and supplanted the forms of procedure which had received the sanction of so many generations oi great lawyers and judges. He seldom resorted to it in practice, and I have heard him on more than one occasion express his distrust of and im- patience with the loose methods of equity procedure by reference to the well known saying of Selden. that " equity is ac- cording to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or nar- rower, so is equity. 'Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot a Chancellor's foot ; what an uncertain measure would this be? One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indiffer- ent foot. 'Tis the same in the Chancel- lor's conscience."
Of course it was a necessary and in- evitable corollary of such views that he should be conservative, and slow to sanction a departure from the settled principles of law and decisions of the Courts. But although stare decisis was his motto, no man was more bold and fearless than he in attacking anything which he was profoundly convinced was wrong, or unsupported by reason. The certainty of the law was to him of in- estimable value, but he held firmly to the letter and spirit of the maxim of the great judgment in Coggs vs. Bernard, that " nothing is law that is not reason."
Such a man, so lavishly endowed by nature, so equipped by study and reflec- tion, and filling so large a space in the public eye, could not fail to impress him-
��self upon the judicial history of his time. An examination of our Reports cover- ing the period of his active professional lite, will prove that he has left his mark upon those discussions and adjudications which have fashioned the jurisprudence of our State, and rounded out the body of law here framed in statutes and de- cisions into harmonious proportions, that command the respect of the profes- sion and of publicists in all parts of America and Europe.
But any sketch of Mr. Christie's character would be imperfect and unjust to his memory which should fail to call attention to the high ethical tone of his professional life. He was the very em- bodiment of a high professional morality. He had a profound reverence for the law, and he would as soon have poisoned his neighbor's spring, as knowingly cor- rupt the fountains of justice, two atroci- ties which my Lord Bacon has some- where, I believe, compared and likened. The same great philosopher and moralist lays it down that " the greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel;" and the celebrated barrister, Charles Phillips, said that " the moment counsel accepts a brief, every faculty he possesses becomes his client's property. It is an implied con- tract between him and the man who trusts him." Mr. Christie fully accepted this code of professional obligation, and his surrender of himself and all his pow- ers to his client was as complete and ab- solute as it could be, consistently with the restraints of truth and honor. When he accepted his brief, whether the case was small or large, his client rich or poor — that client knew that he had se- cured all there was of him — his large brain — his unrivalled industry — his pa- tience in research — his infinite attention to details — and that nothing which lay in human power would be spared to insure success. The members of this bar will recall memorable instances of this con- scientious fidelity to his client and his cause, where he expended the energies of a giant upon causes of slight impor- tance, in which nothing of moment was involved.
He also had a great respect and defer-
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