The Law as a Career in America the local agent asked instructions of his company's general manager at Dennison, Texas, as to what should be done with its contents. The manager replied, in substance, that he hoped the mixture with gasolene wouldn't make the oil unduly dangerous, but that, anyhow, they must "take the risk" and "see what would happen." What did happen was that they sold three barrels of the compound, for ordinary coal-oil, to a grocery store, that a clerk in the store bought a canful for use in his home, that his house was destroyed and his wife and two children were burned to death. In this instance it will be noted that the corporation in question had to choose between rendering some thous ands of gallons of its product less readily salable through compliance with the law and good faith towards those with whom it dealt, and endangering life and prop erty through disregard of the law and a fraud upon its customers; its manager promptly chose the second course and took the attendant "risks," meaning, we may safely conjecture, the risks of trouble and expense to the company through litigation or loss of trade, not at all the risks of death or misery to others; these last mentioned "risks" probably never enter the mind of any experienced officer of this corporation. Resolute and consistent observance of the policy illustrated by his answer has made some men enormously rich and some aggregations of corporate capital enormously profitable and enormously powerful; but lawyers are hardly fitted for such work. A lawyer is trained to feel scruples, perhaps a cynic may say he is trained to affect them; but you will know when you are as old as I am, if you do not know already, that no man can make other men think him very scrupulous unless he is at least a little scrupulous in fact: no hypocrite
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is a successful or dangerous hypocrite who is altogether a hypocrite; the most mischievous impostors the world has known have been more than half fanatics. I know, of course, that the generalissimo of industry or finance in our days wants lawyers and pays them well, but he doesn't want as lawyers men like himself. He is a very "prac tical" man, and, just for this reason, he knows that a legal adviser no less "practical" might be perhaps too "prac tical" to be useful or safe. He needs and wishes the services of the strongest men the Bar can furnish, and he has sense enough to be willing to pay for such services what such services are fairly worth; but it is precisely because the strongest men for the work of the Bar are very different men from those strongest in his work that he needs and pays them. It follows from what I have said that I do not recommend the law as a career for one whose chief purpose in life is to die a multi-millionaire; my subject does not demand that I express any opinion as to whether that purpose is itself a wise or worthy purpose. A story, which may or not be wholly mythical, is told of one of the best known among the Crcesuses of today. When he was already a very rich man, he had the habit of dining near his place of business at an eating house which furnished a table d'hote dinner for forty cents and each day he gave his waiter a "tip" of ten cents. After a while the proprietor raised the price of his dinners to forty-five cents; thereupon the capital ist reduced his gratuity to five cents. The waiter remonstrated, and remarked, "If I were such a man as you are, I wouldn't try to save five cents on my dinner." "If," rejoined the man of wealth, "you were such a man as I am, you wouldn't be a waiter in a cheap restaurant." This
