und rules of law, the presenting of the whole case of each
party and of the best argument which can be made upon it by his
counsel, the charge of the judge and the verdict of the jury,--all
are necessary parts of the process of reaching truth and justice.
Counsel themselves cannot know a whole case until tried to its end;
their clients have a right to their best services, within the limits
of personal honor; and lawyers are derelict in duty, not only to
their clients, but to justice itself, if they do not present their
cases to the best of their ability, when they are to be followed by
opposing counsel, by the judge, and by the jury. The popular judgment
is not only capricious,--it not only assumes that legal precedents,
founded in justice for the protection of the honest, are petty
technicalities or tricks through which the dishonest escape,--it is
not only formed out of the court-room, with no opportunity to see
witnesses and hear testimony, often very different in reality from
what they seem in print,--but it visits upon counsel its ignorant
prejudices against the theory and practice of the law itself, and
forgets that lawyers cannot present to the jury a particle of
evidence except with the sanction of the court under sound rules of
law, and that the law is to be laid down by the court alone.

A man thoroughly in earnest in any direction is more or less a
partisan. Histories are commonly uninfluential or worthless, unless
written with views so earnest and decided as to show bias. As the
greater interests of truth are best subserved by those whose zeal is
commensurate to their scope of mind, so it is a part of the scheme of
jury-trials, that, within the limits we have named, counsel shall
throw their whole force into their cases, that thus they may be
presented fully in all lights, and the right results more surely
reached. The scheme of jury-trials itself thus providing for a
lawyer's standing in the place of his client and deriving from him
his partisan opinions, and for urging his case in its full force
within the limits of sound rules of law, it almost invariably
follows, that, the greater the talent and zeal of the advocate, and
the more he believes in the views of his client, the more liable he
is to be charged with overstating or misstating testimony. Mr. Choate
never conceived that his duty to his client should carry him up to
the line of self-surrender drawn by Lord Brougham; but, recognizing
his client's f