Tribute of Judge William H. DeWitt.

Supreme Court of Montana.

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to add my tribute to the thousands which are rendered to Dr. Dwight upon his retirement from his active duties at Columbia College Law School.

It has not been my privilege to even meet Dr. Dwight since, shortly after being graduated, I had his kindly God-speed in starting for a country then as distant from New York as is now the Congo Free State, a country which, even the other day, was criticised in Boston as a remote mining camp unfit to be a State.

But, in a somewhat varied experience of a dozen years, in seeing a noble commonwealth grow from a small group of mining communities, and during a slight participation in the making of a State, no influence has been more potent or present in my life than that of the two years' instruction of Dr. Dwight.

My memory runs toward him in three channels. The first is that through which go the thoughts of all his students, his magnificent system of instruction. It meets a response with his pupils to say that in his instruction he laid a foundation of principles upon which he afterwards developed to the student the superstructure of cases which has been built upon them. The terse and expressive condensations, which we call maxims, and the underlying principles of the law, he planted in the student's mind and tilled with daily applications to varying facts, until they took a root as lasting as life itself.

The writer of this letter happens to have had his lot cast where a new common law upon two subjects has, within a few years, been developed that is the Western American law of mines and water rights. This is not the place to discuss or even define the radical departures from the ancient law of real estate which have been taken in the matter of mining and the use of water in the Western States. They are departures required by geological and climatic facts, and by the allpowerful necessities of a people-a people who, under their wagon bows, along with their rifles and picks and shovels, brought their fathers' common law, the everlasting principles of which they adapted to a new

environment-principles which Dr. Dwight made household words to those who sat under his instruction. There is one of his students, of the class of 1878, to whom, in the endeavor to solve the ever-recurring legal problems, often comes a thought, with the accompaniment of "as Dwight used to say."

Another of my happiest recollections of that great teacher is his high moral view of the profession. Banter upon lawyers' lack of integrity is common upon the lips of laymen. It is a stock joke of the stage. It is good-naturedly tolerated in the profession. With Dr. Dwight it was wholly absent. I do not remember his ever indulging in humor, the subject of which was the sometimes alleged moral weakness of the members of the profession. He taught us not only law, but law morals. He impressed us with a belief that the law was the most honorable of all callings in life, a belief which the vicissitudes of experience have not shaken from the soil in which he planted it.

There is one other memory of Dr. Dwight's history in the law school which is near to the hearts of many of his students, and of which I, in common with others, can speak with grateful remembrance. Many of us relied upon tutoring and coaching law-school students, conditioned in Latin, in order to supply certain sumptuary demands of nature and an artificial civilization. Dr. Dwight did more than give us letters of recommendation. He found us work, and took pleasure in doing it. Hundreds of his students owe to his interest and efforts the fact that they found the means by which they were enabled to prosecute their studies.

I can look back to many other instructors whom I admired and respected, but Dr. Dwight occupies the higher place of teacher and friend.

He has built himself a monument in the hearts of his pupils. Its foundation rises from every State in the Union. May it be many years before its cap-piece is placed, and the end shall crown the work.

HELENA, MONTANA, April 22, 1891.

Tribute of William P. Fowler.

Fresident New York, Ontario, and western Railroad.

It is said of Judge Joseph Story "that his familiar bearing toward 'the boys' as he called the students,-his frankness, bubbling humor, merry and contagious laugh, and inexhaustible fund of incident and anecdote, with which he gave piquancy and zest to the driest themes, won for him the love of his pupils, whose professional careers, after they left the Harvard Law School, he watched with fatherly interest."

How truly these words apply to the work of Professor Dwight, those who have been "his boys" can bear witness.

The daily sessions at Columbia Law School have been for many years not only hours of profit but hours of pleasure. Under Professor Dwight, there were no dry themes, and, after the daily lecture, what a pleasure it always was to come in familiar contact with one who, beyond doubt or question, was the earnest and devoted friend of each and every man whose good fortune it was to attend those sessions. Nor did his fatherly interest end at the class-room door. Each young man, in starting out, with the Law School behind him, the world before him, and his diploma in his pocket, felt that he was still one of Professor Dwight's "boys," and that his record had a place somewhere "in the heart of a friend."

A brilliant chapter in the history of Columbia Law School is about to close. The man who made it successful and renowned is to transfer its cares and responsibilities-which, to him, have been a sacred trustto other able, but younger, men.

May we not, with propriety, at this time, quote Judge Story's own words, and confess that "we dwell with pleasure upon the entirety of a life adorned by consistent principles and filled up in the discharge of virtuous duty, where there is nothing to regret and nothing to conceal ; no friendships broken; no confidence betrayed; no timid surrenders to popular clamor; no eager reaches for popular favor. May the period be yet far distant when praise shall speak out, with that fulness of utterance which belongs to the sanctity of the grave."

Professor Dwight will carry with him, in retiring, the esteem and affection of hundreds of men, each of whom is a better, wiser man for having been one of "his boys."

NEW YORK, April 8, 1891.

Tribute of William B. Hornblower.

I cannot forego the pleasure of contributing my share towards a testimonial to Professor Dwight, upon his retirement from active service in connection with Columbia Law School.

Whatever may be said as to the comparative merits of various systems of instruction as pursued in the different law schools of the country, and whatever theoretical advantages one system may have over another, I think it will be generally conceded that Professor Dwight has achieved a pre-eminence among the legal instructors of his time in attaining the practical result of imparting to his students a clear, coherent, and logical view of the law of the land as the student is called upon to deal with it in the practical affairs of life. No man with average ability can have graduated from Columbia Law School under Professor Dwight's tuition without being a reasonably well-equipped lawyer for the work that he has before him. The luminous exposition of legal principles, the constant and patient reiteration of those principles, the copious fund of illustration showing the application of the principles to legal controversies, which have characterized Professor Dwight's instruction, have necessarily furnished to the student who has carefully followed the Professor's course with a fund of information which cannot fail to have made him a ready and accurate lawyer at the very outset of his career. If himself endowed with a love of learning for its own sake, and a fondness for research, he has received a stimulus which will enable him during his professional life to add to his fund of information by historical study of the sources of the law; he has a nucleus of legal principles, around which he can gather and assort in orderly arrangement all the results of his individual investigation. If, on the other hand, as happens with most lawyers, he is thrown at once into the practical discussion and conduct of legal controversies growing out of the daily affairs of life, he is able to bring to bear upon those controversies the principles and rules which during his Law School course have been so thoroughly and constantly enforced upon his mind. I do not mean to be understood as intimating that Professor Dwight has ignored the historical study of the law. On the contrary, so far as can be done in the time allotted, I believe he has

given a sufficient résumé of the history of legal principles to throw light upon their real meaning as finally evolved and developed; but the emphasis has been placed by him in his teaching rather upon the results than upon the process by which the result is reached. Bracton, and Shepherd's Touchstone, and Coke upon Littleton, and the Year Books have been by no means overlooked by Professor Dwight in his instruction, but he has recognized the fact that the average student has neither the time nor the disposition for curious historical research, and if he be above the average, and has the time or the disposition, he will for himself pursue the lines of investigation to which his tastes direct him. Professor Dwight has, if I mistake not, proceeded rather upon the idea that it is more important for the legal practitioner, as for the medical practitioner, to know how to deal with actual cases and to apply the settled rules of his science, than to know what were the rules a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years ago. I do not mean by this to be understood as belittling historical research, or what may be called the more theoretical mode of studying the science of jurisprudence. Each system has its advantages, but I am inclined to think that for the average man Professor Dwight's system is the better. At any rate, in my own case, I cheerfully bear testimony to the fact that I received under Professor Dwight's instruction such a thorough and comprehensive and lucid exposition of the principles which I have since been called upon to practically apply, that I would not exchange it for any other instruction which I might have received under some other theory or plan.

Professor Dwight's personal qualities have aided him much in dealing with the minds of the young men brought before him. His imperturbable good-nature, his gentleness and kindness of manner, his indulgence for the errors and mistakes and even the heedlessness and indifference of his students, and his patient persistence in re-explaining and re-enforcing what many another man would think had already been sufficiently explained and enforced, have stimulated many a mind which otherwise would have given up in despair. No student, I venture to say, ever felt rebuffed or snubbed by Professor Dwight, so long as he was seeking for light, however irritating and exasperating might have been his apparent slowness of apprehension or forgetfulness of principles frequently brought to his attention.

It is a matter of great regret to all the graduates of Columbia Law School that Professor Dwight is about to cease from active work in that institution. We trust that his successors will be worthy of him in his qualities of mind and heart.

NEW YORK, April 25, 1891.