Just the Boy Wanted

The Youth’s Companion, Feb.7 1889, p.73(Vol 62)

JUST THE BOY WANTED, II IN THE LAW, by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Research materials relating to life of Oliver Wendell Holmes.)

A boy who wants to succeed in the law will probably do so. An encouraging thought, as far as it goes. But the power to want to do a thing is as much a talent as the power to do it well, and the two are very apt to go together. So that I am not offering encouragement, but stating the first inborn gift which the boy born for the law must have.

The boy who is wanted in the law must be able himself to want something very hard all the time, and for a long time. But this is true for the most part of all who are wanted any where in life. There are some other talents which have a more special connection with the law.

The law is a great mass of rules, showing when and how for a man is liable to be punished, or to be made to hand over money or property to his neighbors, and so forth. These rules are contained in books. A lawyer learns them in the main by reading books.

He begins by doing little else then read, and after he has prepared himself by, any, three years’ study to practice, still, all his life long and almost every day, he will be looking into books to read a little more than he already knows about some new question which he has got to answer.

The power to use books, then is a talent which the would-be lawyer ought to possess. He ought to have enough flexibility and fineness or mental fibre to make it easy for him to collect ideas from printed words. Be ought to have some readiness in finding what a book contains, and something of an instinct for where to look for what he wants.

But although this is the power of which he will first feel the need, it is not the most important. A lawyer does not study law to recite upon it, as a boy studies the Latin grammar or mathematics; he studies it to use it and to act upon the rules which he has learned in real life. His business is to try cases in court, and to advise men what to do in order to keep out or get out of trouble. He studies his books in order to advise and to try his cases in the right way.

So it will be seen at once that book-learning is only the beginning. A men may be clumsy with his books, but if he can tell another man in distress what to do, he has the better half of ability. If he can seize at once the important facts from out the sea of dramatic circumstances poured in upon him by eager witnesses or clients, he will find plenty of students to help him to what he wants from the library.

Practical judgment, that is, a sense of the relative importance of things with reference to the accomplishment of some desired end, is what commands the world. Before a boy is fifteen you can tell whether he has it. If he has it, he will show it in the law. The lawyer’s judgment is a sense of the relative importance of facts with reference to the rules of law, and a sense also,- the more the better,- of their importance with regard to business, because law and business are bound together very closely, and in advising a man what to do the lawyer often needs to consider business consequences as well as law.

But a lawyer’s occupation is not only to advise, but to persuade. Persuasion needs other gifts beside judgment, and more than one. If it were only to persuade courts, that is, bodies of experts dealing with questions of the kind which they are trained to answer, the chief needs would be clearness of thought which makes clearness of statement, and that sort of ease and familiarity in handling ideas which is one of the marks of a civilized man. The former is a gift, the latter partly a gift, but more the result of training still comparatively rare in this country.

But these are not the only needs. A lawyer has to persuade juries as well as judges, he has to argue before committees, to deal with matters of legislation, and to make men in all kinds of callings believe what he wants to convince them of.

You may convince a lawyer of a proposition of law by reasoning alone, but to carry an untrained man upon a question of conduct or of life, takes all the powers of year nature at once.

A man’s deepest beliefs are the product of all his powers and passions and his whole experience; and in some degree the whole man goes into his belief upon may mixed and practical question. To bring about a fighting belief, the whole man must be roused. When roused he is sometimes easily led. But to lead a man, or even to set in motion the predetermined drift of his nature, you must be able to do more than state your propositions clearly, you must be able to point transporting pictures in which one finds himself arrived at the desired conclusion by an act of vision.

A bad man will awaken in his hearers whatever close prejudice, or mean envy, or base unbelief will make it easy for them to side with him. A noble one will reveal to them in themselves heretofore unsuspected powers of aspiration, and high flight toward lofty and generous thoughts, and will carry them on wings over the gulfs that cross his path. But, bad or good, the persuasive man has tact to discern the kind of natures with which he has to dear, and to feel, by a sort of instinct, in what directions they will follow easily, and from what they will turn away.

Most of the very successful jury lawyers whom I have known have had some little spark or touch, at least, of imagination. Te most famous, as we all know, have had a great deal. It is surprising how far ever a very little will go, as any one may see by comparing successful speeches with the poetry, or even with the famous prose writing of our literature.

One other requisite should be mentioned if a man is to succeed in the most brilliant walks of the profession, and that is a tough constitution. Not necessarily the kind of strength that rows in prize crews, but a talent for living and keeping in working order under difficulties. An advocate, and in a less degree an adviser, has to undergo great stretches of prolonged intellectual sport, often joined with bodily exertion, and sometimes with great excitement and anxiety.
The pace is killing, and very many of the most successful lawyers break down in middle life, have to take a rest, perhaps, for years, and when they come back to their work, do so with soberer gait and with precautions. If they had not been exceptional people, the would not have come back at all.

I have mentioned the gifts which seem tome the most important for a great success at the bar. There are quiet and pleasant places in the law for which less is sufficient. It is to be said, too, that the law offers employment, or at least, an opening for a considerable variety of talents. As they say of Boston, it is a good place to go from. In actually making up one’s mind, there are many secondary considerations to be taken into account from a good voice to potent temperament or favorable connections. But I do not think much of brilliant starts; the battle will depend after all on the native force of the man. The degree of our force is determined for us in advance, and in the great shaking up of men together in life, most men sooner or later reach the place where they belong. This is destiny if you choose, but a part of man’s destiny, and the means by which the inevitable comes to pass, is striving. In a sense, what a man wants he can have.

The desire of his soul is the prophecy of his fate.