566
The Green Bag
1852, when he was Speaker of the Iowa Legislature. He had now tasted all the sweets of official position, and being full of the expanding energy of his day and generation, and realizing the great demands of the time in the great West, he set himself to do a much greater and more enduring work as a man. He returned to the practice of his profession, giving special attention to railroad cases. He also became personally and finan cially interested in railroad enterprises, and was the first President of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company. From that date, during some twenty odd years, he devoted himself with un remitting energy to his professional and business matters, and had at one time the largest practice of any man in the United States, perhaps, before the Supreme Court at Washington. He made at one time in a railroad case a fee exceeding one hundred thousand dollars. No record of Judge Grant's career would be reliable or honest which did not take account of some of the in firmities of his character. The very celerity of his mental operations made him sometimes intolerant of dullness or sloth in others. He was full of wise saws and sayings and tried to confine his life to them, but temptation often beset him. One of his main maxims was that "civility and politeness cost nothing, and pass current in all the markets of the world," which he often quoted in his office and at home. Another one of his firm beliefs was that cheerfulness and good humor should always go with a good appetite to the family table. He insisted that there should be good humor and merriment always in his family at meal times. Nevertheless, he could not always con trol his temper, and on one occasion,
when his nephew, Whit. M. Grant, was found by him having a hot altercation with a man, he called the young man aside after the affair was over and said, "Son, a soft answer turneth away wrath. You should not have scolded that man, but let him think he was having his own way." A few days after that, the man with whom the nephew had had the altercation came back and had an angry dispute with the Judge about the same subject-matter. Judge Grant lost his temper completely and knocked him down, whereupon, the nephew, who could not resist the temptation to have a laugh at his uncle's expense, ap proached him and said, "Uncle, why didn't you try the soft answer on him?" The Judge immediately regained his composure and laughed, saying, "Yes, yes, I should have done so." He was a constant reader of the Bible, and often quoted it, but like most other men he was not quite able always to live up to its precepts. We find him now, after the lapse of fifty years from his matriculation, at the University of North Carolina, re turning to deliver an address to the Alumni at Chapel Hill on the 6th day of June, 1878. Here, surely, we shall find some outcroppings of that secret man who had been planning and achieving so much in all those years. "The motions of his spirit" must necessarily be felt somewhere in this notable ad dress, which he delivered in the ma turity of his powers to the alumni of the university at which he received his most effectual training for his life's work, and before a large gathering of graduates, some of whom had been in his class of the year 1831. Accordingly, we find that he retained a strong affection for the people and institution of his native state, and that he did not undervalue the work of the
