McKinley and Bryan as Lawyers. ities. It had been remarked by lawyers and judges of the Ohio courts that, " if Mc Kinley stated a proposition it was difficult to gainsay it, so thorough had been his ex aminations, and so ethically accurate were his comments." He had several times in arguments quoted Edward Burke in his noted saying, " Law combines the prin ciples of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns." In that quality of respecting original jus tice in legal contentions, Mr. Bryan, accord ing to the testimony of his partner Talbot, made tally with Major McKinley; and a favorite saying with Bryan was one quoted from the eminent Sergeant Hill, of the old London Bar, " Law that shocks equity is reason's murder." The friends of both com petitors for the Presidential chair agree that in respecting natural ethics and the tradi tional ethics of their profession, neither one can surpass the other. Although the acutest lawyers in the House of Representatives were his fellows on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. McKinley's legal views, except for per haps political differences, were never as sailed. During the Congressional recesses Major McKinley returned more or less to legal practice, as some of the volumes of Critchfield's Ohio reports show. Unlike some Congressmen, he declined practice in pen sion cases and before the Court of Claims; as also did Congressman Bryan, because each was unwilling to incur the suspicion of bar tering subsequent votes as to claims through counsel fees. And both declined to follow the example of some other of their fellow members who would appear as private coun sel before committees of the House or Sen ate, or among the Departments of the Gov ernment. Any shrewd outside observer of Congressional life in Washington knows that the feed lobbyist is not always, as the name strictly implies, a member of lobby or cloak room only. There was an appreciable difference be
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tween the legal beginnings of the two politi cal competitors; for Mr. McKinley com menced his studies and his practice in a locality where he was not only known, but had become more or less noted and popular as a victorious soldier of the army. Although Mr. Bryan had begun practice at Jackson ville, Illinois, where he made an early mar riage with an accomplished lady, who also obtained a legal diploma, and became his legal helpmeet as well as maritally, he sought as a permanent home the growing city of Lincoln, where, an utter stranger, he joined the Nebraska Bar. How well his associate students at the Union College of Law of Chicago, where he had received an LL. B., remembered his scholarship will appear from the following testimonial, and congratulatory letter which within a few days after his nomination they addressed to him, and which bears the signatures of Fred erick M. Williams, Frank A. Smith, Frank Hall Childs, A. E. Case, J. Willard New man, Samuel J. Lombard, William J. Marka, W. H. Pope, Alfred E. Holt, Louis P. Hol land, Thomas W. Prindeville, Morris P. Trainor, John H. Rollins, Grose Hall, O. P. Seward, J. H. Chamberlain' and Taylor E. Browne, who are all now Chicago practi tioners. "We the undersigned members of the class of '83, in the Union College of Law, who now reside at Chicago, prompted by a fraternal spirit, arising from our college as sociations with yourself and from a just pride in your splendid achievement, write — without regard to political affiliations or individual views on pending political issues — in this expression of our high apprecia tion of your fidelity to your honest convic tions, and the manly qualities that have en abled you to so effectively carve out of the course of events the position before the American people you have the distinction to occupy. As a class recognizing — from the inception of our acquaintance and as sociation with you to the termination of our
