The ways of the hour

by James Fenimore Cooper

All this time the two little parlours mentioned were receiving their company. The law is doubtless a very elevated profession, when its practice is on a scale commensurate with its true objects. It becomes a very different pursuit, however, when its higher walks are abandoned, to choose a path amid its thickets and quagmires. Perhaps no human pursuit causes a wider range of character among its votaries, than the practice of this profession. In the first place, the difference, in an intellectual point of view, between the man who sees only precedents, and the man who sees the principles on which they are founded, is as marked as the difference between black and white. To this great distinction in mind, is to be added another that opens a still wider chasm, the results of practice, and which depends on morals. While one set of lawyers turn to the higher objects of their calling, declining fees in cases of obviously questionable right, and struggle to maintain their honesty in direct collision with the world and its temptations, another, and much the largest, falls readily into the practices of their craft—the word seems admirably suited to the subject—and live on, encumbered and endangered not only by their own natural vices, but greatly damaged by those that in a manner they adopt, as it might be ex officio. This latter course is unfortunately that taken by a vast number of the members of the bar all over the world, rendering them loose in their social morality, ready to lend themselves and their talents to the highest bidder, and causing them to be at first indifferent, and in the end blind, to the great features of right and wrong. These are the moralists who advance the doctrine that “the advocate has a right to act as his client would act;” while the class first named allow that “the advocate has a right to do what his client has a right to do,” and no more.

Perhaps there was not a single member of the profession present that night in the two little parlours of Mrs. Horton, who recognized the latter of these rules; or who did not, at need, practise on the former. As has been already said, these were the rowdies of the Duke’s county bar. They chewed, smoked, drank, and played, each and all coarsely. To things that were innocent in themselves they gave the aspect of guilt by their own manners. The doors were kept locked; even amid their coarsest jokes, their ribaldry, their oaths that were often revolting and painfully frequent, there was an uneasy watchfulness, as if they feared detection. There was nothing frank and manly in the deportment of these men. Chicanery, management, double-dealing, mixed up with the outbreakings of a coarse standard of manners, were visible in all they said or did, except, perhaps, at those moments when hypocrisy was paying its homage to virtue. This hypocrisy, however, had little, or at most a very indirect connection with anything religious. The offensive offshoots of the exaggerations that were so abounding among us half a century since, are giving place to hypocrisy of another school. The homage that was then paid to principles, however erroneous and forbidding, is now paid to the ballot-boxes. There was scarcely an individual around those card-tables, at which the play was so obviously for the stakes as to render the whole scene revolting, who would not have shrunk from having his amusements known. It would seem as if conscience consulted taste. Everything was coarse and offensive; the attitudes, oaths, conversation, liquors, and even the manner of drinking them. Apart from the dialogue, little was absolutely done that might not have been made to lose most of its repulsiveness, by adopting a higher school of manners; but of this these scions of a noble stock knew no more than they did of the parent stem.

It is scarcely necessary to say that both Williams and Timms were of this party. The relaxation was, in fact, in conformity with their tastes and practices; and each of these excrescences of a rich and beneficent soil counted on the meetings in Mrs.[Mrs.] Horton’s private rooms, as the more refined seek pleasure in the exercise of their tastes and habits.

“I say, Timms,” bawled out an attorney of the name of Crooks—“You play’d a trump, sir—all right—go ahead—first rate—good play, that—ours dead. I say, Timms, you’re going to save Mary Monson’s neck. When I came here, I thought she was a case; but the prosecution is making out miserably.”

“What do you say to that, Williams?” put in Crooks’s partner, who was smoking, playing, and drinking, with occasional ‘asides’ of swearing, all, as might be, at the same time. “I trump that, sir, by your leave—what do you say to that, Williams?”

“I say that this is not the court; and trying such a cause once ought to satisfy a reasonable man.”

“He’s afraid of showing his hand, which I am not,” put in another, exposing his cards as he spoke. “Williams always has some spare trumps, however, to get him out of all his difficulties.”

“Yes, Williams has a spare trump, and there it is, giving me the trick,” answered the saucy lawyer, as coolly as if he had been engaged in an inferior slander-suit. “I shall be at Timms pretty much by the same process to-morrow.”

“Then you will do more than you have done to-day, Master Williams. This Mrs. Jane Pope may be a trump, but she is not the ace. I never knew a witness break down more completely.”

“We’ll find the means to set her up again—I think that knave is yours, Green—yes, I now see my game, which is to take it with the queen—very much, Timms, as we shall beat you to-morrow. I keep my trump card always for the last play, you know.”