that he was a sincere, upright, patriotic man, and an earnest and persuasive speaker.
The career of Mr. Hahn illustrates the beneficence of our institutions as well as how much may be accomplished under them by self-denial, hard work, inherent virtue, and earnestness of purpose. Young men may take courage from his example. Born in Bavaria November 24, 1830, he was brought to the city of New Orleans when ten years of age, one of five children under the care of a widowed mother, whose early death left him to the guardianship of friends and to his own unaided resources. He was fortunate, however, in living in a community quick to recognize merit and in falling under the kindly guidance and instruction of Hon. Christian Roselius, in whose office he was chiefly prepared for the practice of the law. Christian Roselius was for many years a leading lawyer at the New Orleans bar and educated more young men for the practice of the profession than any other lawyer of his generation, not only as the veteran professor of law in the University of Louisiana, but he possessed great benevolence, and never omitted an opportunity to aid any young man of merit who was struggling for admission to the bar or in the early years of his practice.
The active interest which Mr. Roselius manifested in all worthy young men I think was owing not only to his own experience in early life, for he himself had reached the head of his profession in the State of Louisiana by triumphing over all the difficulties that early poverty imposes, his only weapons being an invincible will and the highest order of intellect, but because the great lawyer had seen his own fondest hopes crushed in the death of his only son, attractive beyond all his compeers, a type of rarest manly beauty, and possessing every intellectual accomplishment, cut off at the very threshold of his manhood. There still dwells upon my memory the image of Conrad Roselius as he appeared when we first met at school, the fairest, brightest, and most gifted of the companions of my youth.
I will not recapitulate the successive steps by which Michael Hahn won his way to the confidence and support of a large body of
