PART FIRST. CONTAINING CASES ARGUED AT THE JANUARY TERM, 1874, AND PRESENTATION OF THE PORTRAIT OF JUDGE DUNN.* At the meeting of the court on Tuesday, April 29, 1873, present LUTHER S. DIXON, Chief Justice, and ORSAMUS COLE, Associate Justice, EDWARD G. RYAN, Esq., addressed the court as follows: May it please the Court: There is something deeply instructive in the reverence and tenderness with which we cherish the memory of the dead. This is not altogether the result of our affection for the living. It is a trite observation that honor often strives to compensate the dead for the world's neglect of them, living. There are ample evidences of constant affection among brutes; but the brute, dead or even dying, is unheeded and forgotten of his fellows. There is no love in nature for the extinct. With us, there is a sanctity in death which is not given to life. We love the dead the more that they are dead. And this is true, not only of those whom we loved in life, but of others whom we never knew; true, in its degree, of the good and great who died a thousand years before our day. Our own dead we jealously treasure in our secret hearts, with a love which sometimes sleeps but never dies; with a longing for them, which is faith in their life after death. This is the normal confession of the heart of the immortality of the soul; it is the voice of nature speaking, through all times, in all human hearts, however enlightened by true phi losophy or darkened by false; which no faith can exclude and no philosophy can deny. It is not the voice of our hearts; it is the voice of God, speaking in our hearts; the instinct of nature, bearing witness to its own imperishable essence, and to Him who gave it. For love belongs to the living, not the dead. We can admire the inanimate, value its qualities, enjoy its uses; but we cannot love it. The fabled sculptor, who loved the marble beauty his own chisel fashioned, is not more mythical in the power to animate the marble, than in the feeling to love the inanimate. We stand in pleased wonder before the artist's counterfeit of the human form, because it mocks us with the look of life. We bend in reverent awe beside the body of the dead, because it held the The proceedings here printed would have appeared more fittingly in vol. 32; but it is believed that their publication in the present volume will be more acceptable to the profession than an entire failure t› preserve them in this form. - REP. Presentation of the Portrait of Judge Dunn. life that cannot die. The statue may bear the glory of art for ages. The body must speedily rot, because the life has left it. But human sense is less shocked by brutal mutilation of the artist's ideal, than by the least irreverence to the dissolving tenement of the departed soul. We do not love it. It awes us and offends us; but we love the life that abode in it, and reverence the decaying body for the sake of the undying soul. The living heart eludes the bonds of its own clay; and goes forth, into the dark infinite, after the undying soul of the dead, with a yearning and undying love, which is nature's prophecy of immortality - nature's instinct that the soul does not die with the body, but leaves the body for another life. We love the living only; and we love the dead, with love which does not die with death, because the dead do not die with death, but the body only. One who has already gone a little before us, to prove his own doctrine, and who, but a little while ago, was a great lawyer and statesman, argued that this immortality of love was no mean proof of the immortality of the soul. He could not believe, we cannot bring ourselves to believe, that the beneficent Creator, whose means are so perfectly adapted to His ends, and whose mercy is over all His works, should have given us this painful yearning for the dead, this undying love, all in vain; a most pitiful delusion, a mockery of all that is best and noblest in us, if indeed life ends in the physical death of the body. In his published work, he does not seem to have perceived the analogy. I am quite sure that he sees it now. For if we, burthened with this sensual clay, long so after the spirits gone forth from kindred clay, how easy and logical it is to believe that they, the enfranchised souls of the dead, look back with loving interest on the life they have survived, and cherish those they left behind with love as faithful as their own. The love of the living beat in the hearts of the dead, when alive; and it is impossible not to think that their love, too, survives death, and that the dead love the living with the same undying love as the living love the dead. And thus this human love of ours bridges over the grave, and binds in sympathy together, those of us who live on earth, with those who have gone before us to the place of departed spirits. It is written that God is love. Love is essentially immortal. And this is the significance of our love for the dead. Whither they have gone, our love follows them. While we remain, their love returns to us; and where they are, awaits us. We love the dead, because they are not dead; and they us, because we cannot die. The dead and the living are bound together in love, because the grave is another womb from which all are born again, to live together forever. I do not ignore in this the rewards and punishments of the future life. They are part of my faith; but I do not consider them here. It is not the place, nor am I fitted to discuss them. Neither is this an occasion, nor I SUPREME COURT OF WISCONSIN. Presentation of the Portrait of Judge Dunn. 23 the person, to speak of the communion of saints. But there are countless analogies between nature and religion, because both are from ONE; be. cause, properly considered, nature is religion and religion is nature. And it is not unbecoming me to speak of the blessed communion of the dead and the living, which is a natural aspect of the communion of saints, and properly considered, not inconsistent with it; which sanctifles life and beautifies death. Nearer than neighboring nations sometimes are, the dead and the living are one people and one kindred. Their communion is closer than that of father and unborn child; in one sense perhaps closer than that of unborn child and mother. The dead and the living have no sensual communion. We cannot see them; it may be that they see us. We cannot tell. But at least we know their love for us, and they know our love for them. The subject is too wide a field for discussion in this address. And I must hurry on to the fulfillment of my purpose. But I must be permitted to advert to one professional aspect of it. It is a bad habit of the world sometimes to speak slightingly of our profession. From JACK CADE down, demagogues have naturally borne no good will to lawyers; and demagogues give much of its tone to that morbid thing which they not inaptly style, public sentiment; quite a different thing from public opin ion, which should always be respected, even when in error. And it is the fashion of public sentiment to sneer at lawyers. But we know, that, whatever discredit the professional demagogues, or pettifoggers, may bring on the profession, the profession itself is a noble one; as noble as any secular profession, perhaps the noblest of them all. We know the high-toned morality, the benevolent wisdom, the staunch loyalty to huraan right, of true lawyers in all ages. We know that men of our profession have been in the van, through all modern history, in every true ameliora tion of society. And when we remember the long line of worthies who have gone before us, in the history of the common law, and their communion with us, it ought to fill us all with higher professional zeal, it ought to fill you with almost inspired judgment, to think of the noble fellowship of lawyers who may be watching us; who await us, when - in such brief while our life work shall be ended and we shall join them in the life of life. Who dare be false lawyer or unjust judge, who looks forward to that scrutiny, that cloud of professional witnesses? The lawyers of the past—the dead of our profession-may be looking down upon us, with sad and loving interest. And it was in keeping with all propriety and taste, that you hung on the wall of this court room that face of mild and sad gravity, of one who was chief justice here but a little time ago. It should remind us all here, not merely of his gentle character and useful life, but that the dead bench may be sitting in review of the living bench, the dead bar overlooking the living bar; in loving but |