County, Pennsylvania. His father was David S. Knox, a bank cashier, and a man prominent and respected in the community. The son, as a boy, was educated in the local schools, and tradition has it that he did not always refrain from the mischief which makes a schoolmaster's life more or less strenuous. Mr. Knox is a college man,—indeed, he has a double claim to that title. Finishing his preparatory school education he went to the college at Morganstown, West Virginia, now the University of West Virginia. The tra dition is that while there he argued his first case. A serious difference of opinion, on a question of discipline, arose between the faculty and the class of which Mr. Knox was a member. The faculty granted a hearing to the students on the question in dispute; Mr. Knox was chosen as spokesman for the class. He looked very small beside some of his classmates, and it is to be feared that he was chosen partly by way of joke, on account of his small stature; but he delivered an argu ment that' astonished both his classmates and the faculty. . He showed so thorough a com prehension of the principles by which a col lege should be governed, and expounded his objections to the regulation so clearly and forcibly that he succeeded in persuading the faculty to reconsider its action, and to repeal the obnoxious rule. After two years at Morganstown, Mr. Knox went to Mount Union College, at Alliance, Ohio, where he was graduated in 1872. It was while at Mount Union that the friend ship began between President McKinley and his present Attorney General,—a friendship which has remained unbroken for thirty years, and which may fairly be considered as one of the important factors in the recent ap pointment of Mr. Knox. It is said, indeed, that Mr. Knox was led to adopt the law as his profession by the advice of Mr. McKinley in undergraduate days. After graduation Mr. Knox went to Pittsburg, entering as a student the law office of the Honorable H. Bucher Swope, United
States district attorney for the western dis trict of Pennsylvania, and continued in the office of Mr. Swope's successor, the Honor able David Reed, until admitted to the Alle gheny County bar in January, 1875. In the spring of the same year Mr. Knox be came assistant United States district at torney, but held the position only a year, when he resigned to give his whole time to private practice. This was the only public office Mr. Knox ever held, except his Cabinet position. In 1877 he formed a partnership, which has existed up to the present time, with the Honorable James H. Reed, who has served for a time since then as United States Circuit Judge. The branch of the law to which Mr. Knox has devoted himself especially is the law re lating to corporations; in that he made him self an expert, with the natural result that the firm of which he is a member has long counted among its clients many large cor porations, among them the- Carnegie Steel Company. It is interesting to note in pass ing that in the litigation between Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, with whom as the executive head of the Carnegie inter ests Mr. Knox had been brought into close illations, the law firm of Knox and Reed, because of esteem for both litigants, refused to act for either side against the other. But in making a special study of corpora tion law, Mr. Knox has not neglected other branches of the profession; for if we may ac cept the opinion of members of the bar at which he long has been a leader, his opinions on questions of constitutional law are of very great weight. Mr. Knox is a hard worker in his profes sion. Clear minded and alert, yet painstak ing and methodical, he studies a case in tently, familiarizes himself with every detail of law and of fact involved, and having con vinced himself what is the right line of action, fights out the matter to the end with untiring zeal. He is not an orator in the common acceptance of the term; he is not a jury law yer; but he has the gift of placing before the
