And it was. Forty years had passed. Mr. Justice Gray had what may be called a memory. He had much else: an inexhaustible knowledge of case law; a power of dealing readily with complex matters; a fast hold of principles; an industry without limit; the cordial respect of his fellow judges; and a pleasant house in Washington whereof the hostess was one of Washington's favourites. And he had a stature of somewhere between six and seven feet, with a smiling face and massive head to crown this huge frame. He is gone. I wish he were not.
Of the many members of this brilliant Suffolk Bar there was one of a very unusual kind of brilliancy. The brilliancy of invariable success was his. I believe it to be literally true that during many years he never lost a case which depended on the verdict of a jury. At the Bar, of course, as elsewhere, nothing succeeds like success, and Mr. Durant's practice was very large. I have noticed that clients, as a rule, would rather win their cases than lose them. How did he do it? Nobody ever knew. His beaten rivals, or perhaps their clients, sometimes hinted at things nobody ever ventured to assert, since there was not a scintilla of evidence to justify insinuations.
There was probably no secret save what lay on the surface. Mr. Durant was a good lawyer who prepared his cases with a thoroughness that left no point in doubt, and no scrap of evidence unexamined. He knew to a nicety what would tell with a jury and what would not. He was not a man on whom it was possible to spring a surprise. His cross-examinations, without being showy, were deadly. As a speaker—orator he was not—he had no other conspicuous merit than clearness; the art of marshalling facts to fit his own theory of the case. When he rose the jury were predisposed to believe.
He had a way of turning to the jury whenever during the trial he had made a point, brought out a telling fact, or wrung an admission from an incautious witness. It was as if from the beginning he took the jury into partnership; it was a matter in which he and they were alike interested, and the only interest of either was to discover the truth. They said of him what was said by a juryman of another famous advocate: "It's no credit to him to win his causes. He is always on the right side." When Mr. Durant sat down the jury were convinced that he, too, was on the right side, and their verdict was but the formal and legal ratification of the moral view, and, as they believed, of their own conscientious conviction.
Hypnotism? I think not. The thing was not much heard of in those days. It is quite possible that Mr. Durant used discrimination and never took a cause into court in which he did not feel sure of a verdict, but many a lawyer is sure of a verdict he does not get. There remains a residuum of mystery which has never been explained, and is probably inexplicable. Mr. Durant's presence explained something. He had a powerful head, chiselled features, black hair, which he wore rather long, an olive complexion, and eyes which flashed the lightnings of wrath and scorn and irony; then suddenly the soft rays of sweetness and persuasion for the jury. He looked like an actor. He was an actor. He understood dramatic values, and there was no art of the stage he did not employ upon a hostile or unwilling witness. He could coax, intimidate, terrify; and his questions cut like knives.
He had a stage name, like so many other actors. His real name was Smith, which perhaps was not generally known. But one day in court he was tormenting a reluctant witness who had been Jones and was now Robinson. "Mr. Jones," cried Durant—"I beg your pardon, Mr. Robinson." "Yes, Mr. Smith," retorted the witness—"I beg your pardon, Mr. Durant." That cross-examination came quickly to an end. But I believe Mr. Durant's prestige continued while he remained at the Bar; then having amassed a fortune, he abandoned the law and took to preaching. Whether he had the same success in saving souls as in winning causes I never heard.
CHAPTER IX
WENDELL PHILLIPS
It was in the winter of 1860-61 that the Massachusetts allies of the Southern Slave Power made their last effort. Spite of Webster's death, with whom died the brains of the party and its vital force, these men were still powerful in Boston. The surrender of Anthony Burns in May, 1854, the birth of the Republican Party at Worcester in July of the same year, the election of Mr. Henry Wilson as Governor, the cowardly assault in the United States Senate on Charles Sumner by Mr. Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, in 1856—these events had indeed stirred the people of Massachusetts into revolt against the Slave Party in this Free State.