VOL XV.
No. 12.
BOSTON.
DECEMBER, 1903.
LOGAN E. BLECKLEY, Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia Bv L. B. ELLIS. IF a man conversant with the history both intellectual powers are still undimmed and of jurisprudence and of statesmanship his physical vigor remarkable, he is already more than half a dozen years past the threein the South should be asked suddenly to name the salient quality which has hereto score-and-ten terminal. This enduring vigor fore distinguished the masters of these two of body and mind will doubtless be attrib high crafts in the State of Georgia, for ex uted by many to his being mountain-born. ample, he would probably answer, unhesi For a mountaineer of mountaineers is our tatingly, eloquence. But give him time to great judge. Born on the hill-tops, as his reflect upon the eminent achievement, the sires before him, he has always found his dearest happiness there. His unfailing de public services and enduring worth of such men as Berrien, Stephens, Hill, the Cobbs, light has been, whenever the holiday times the Lumpkins and this gray-haired youngest came, the breathing-spaces in his busy brother of the group, Logan E. Bleckley, career, to slip away from crowded thorough would he not rather change his answer to fares and back to the mountain calms, the Wisdom? Xor would he mean wisdom in shades and streams and high, pure air that any restricted sense; rather that quality es had made his' boyhood's joy, and still stood sential to greatness of life, wisdom, which for strength and peace in his life. His can spring only from integrity of intellect lonely little lodge on Screamer Mountain, an and heart wedded to the widest, sanest isolated peak of the Blue Ridge, has been, in his busiest years, a veritable paradise to him; knowledge. while next has ranked in his affections the Judge Bleckley has himself said, in one of pleasant cottage in Clarksville, a hill-top vil those thoughtful essays deserving to live lage in North Georgia. In telling all this among the choice letters of today, that "to T have told, probably, the secret of Judge be wise, we must discern truth and love duty. Elecklcy's long-enduring vitalism' both of To know is not enough; to feel is not physique and intellect. enough; we must both know aright and feel It was early in the mountain boy's life that aright, and from this right knowledge and he chose law as his mistress; and in the first right feeling, we must send forth a life flush of youth he was admitted to the bar. stream of right conduct." Fairly has the life But practice came slowly; for he had opened of the great jurist exemplified his own sim his office in a little country town in the sec ple but majestic conception of wisdom. tion of North Georgia where he was born. The main facts in his career may be The. location was obscure, shut in by moun summed up briefly: tains, and wholly unfavorable to professional He was born on July 3, 1827: so, while bis
