It was by constant contact and conflict with these that
Lincoln acquired professional strength and skill. Every community and
every age creates its own Bar, entirely adequate for its present uses
and necessities. So in Illinois, as the population and wealth of the
State kept on doubling and quadrupling, its Bar presented a growing
abundance of learning and science and technical skill. The early
practitioners grew with its growth and mastered the requisite knowledge.
Chicago soon grew to be one of the largest and richest and certainly
the most intensely active city on the continent, and if any of my
professional friends here had gone there in Lincoln's later years, to
try or argue a cause, or transact other business, with any idea that
Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal learning, science, or
subtlety, they would certainly have found their mistake.

In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especially every court
lawyer, was necessarily a politician, constantly engaged in the public
discussion of the many questions evolved from the rapid development
of town, county, State, and Federal affairs. Then and there, in this
regard, public discussion supplied the place which the universal
activity of the press has since monopolized, and the public speaker who,
by clearness, force, earnestness, and wit; could make himself felt on
the questions of the day would rapidly come to the front. In the absence
of that immense variety of popular entertainments which now feed the
public taste and appetite, the people found their chief amusement in
frequenting the courts and public and political assemblies. In either
place, he who impressed, entertained, and amused them most was the
hero of the hour. They did not discriminate very carefully between the
eloquence of the forum and the eloquence of the hustings. Human nature
ruled in both alike, and he who was the most effective speaker in a
political harangue was often retained as most likely to win in a cause
to be tried or argued. And I have no doubt in this way many retainers
came to Lincoln. Fees, money in any form, had no charms for him--in
his eager pursuit of fame he could not afford to make money. He was
ambitious to distinguish himself by some great service to mankind, and
this ambition for fame and real public service left no room for avarice
in his composition. However much he earned, he seems to have ended every
year hardly richer than he began it, and yet, as the year