son.

"Well, Joe, we'll all do what we can to keep you from being a shot-gun
lawyer," Abe Lincoln began. "I've got a good first lesson for you. I
found it in a letter which Rufus Choate had written to Judge Davis. In
it he says that we rightly have great respect for the decisions of the
majority, but that the law is something vastly greater and more sacred
than the verdict of any majority. 'It is a thing,' says he, 'which has
stood the test of long experience--a body of digested rules and processes
bequeathed to us by all the ages of the past. The inspired wisdom of the
primeval east, the robust genius of Athens and Rome, the keener modern
sense of righteousness are in it. The law comes down to us one mighty and
continuous stream of wisdom and experience accumulated, ancestral,
widening and deepening and washing itself clearer as it runs on, the
agent of civilization, the builder of a thousand cities. To have lived
through ages of unceasing trial with the passions, interests, and affairs
of men, to have lived through the drums and tramplings of conquest,
through revolution and reform and all the changing cycles of opinion, to
have attended the progress of the race and gathered unto itself the
approbation of civilized humanity is to have proved that it carries in
it some spark of immortal life.'"

The face of Lincoln changed as he recited the lines of the learned and
distinguished lawyer of Massachusetts.

"His face glowed like a lighted lantern when he began to say those
eloquent words," Samson writes in his diary. "He wrote them down so that
Josiah could commit them to memory."

"That is a wonderful statement," Samson remarked.

Abe answered: "It suggests to me that the voice of the people in any one
generation may or may not be inspired, but that the voice of the best men
of all ages, expressing their sense of justice and of right, in the law,
is and must be the voice of God. The spirit and body of its decrees are
as indestructible as the throne of Heaven. You can overthrow them but
until their power is reestablished as surely it will be, you will live
in savagery."

"You do not deny the right of revolution."

"No, but I can see no excuse for it in America. It has remained for us to
add to the body of the law the idea that men are created free and equal.
The lack of that saving principle in the codes of the world has been the
great cause of injustice and oppression. The voice of revolution here
would be like t