Talk of exploring expeditions to the Arctic regions as offering specimens of courage and prowess; or of scientific excursions into the wilds of Africa to the same purport! These instances are trivial compared to the courage and prowess yearly displayed by hundreds of attorneys who plunge into the ocean of litigation in order to swim towards the distant buoys which the sun of prosperity always cheers with enlivening beams.
Don't waste sympathy in this connection for the young Sawbones. His thirst for action can be slaked at pauper fountains. For him the emigrant's chamber, the cabin of the arriving ship, the dispensary, the asylums, the hospitals, and the poor-houses, are always open; and if his "soul be in arms," there are (Heaven knows) "frays" in this city numerous enough for any ambitious surgical eagerness.
But for the aspiring attorney where are the avenues open for gratuitous action? Do merchants nail up promissory notes upon awning posts for attorneys to seize and put in suit? What "old nobs" of Wall-street are willing to put themselves "in chancery" to oblige Hopper Tape, Esq., your humble attendant upon the Where are the courts possessing suits without counsel?
We may be told of unfortunate wretches who murder in drunken fits to whom counsel are assigned. But what are ten crusts of bread per annum among a thousand hungry dogs?
Thou must face the truth, young college boy, who now and then dost stroll into court-rooms, or who dost lounge away an hour in a friend's law office admiring his books and piles of papers—thinking the while of the time when thou wilt have graduated and obtained permission to hang up thy pomp-gilded "shingle:" thou must face the truth! The counsel who so attracts thy admiration, in thy court-room lounging, has fought weary years with myriad obstacles; there are the ashes of many nights and days of toil and struggle sprinkled upon his hair; he has fought his way (from where thou sittest a listener to where he stands a speaker), as if through an Indian gauntlet file. There were a hundred mouths waiting for the first crumbs which came to his impatient legal digestion; and a hundred envious heads and hearts to worry him if possible into a dyspepsia over those crumbs. He has began with an office in a fifth story, and climbed down towards the street. He commenced to hive his honey near the roof! While out of his office he climbed a professional ladder, the holding on to which tasked all his powers of physical, mental, and pecuniary endurance. Face the truth!
Reach me yonder diary and legal register. Two thousand practising lawyers in the city of New-York! Out of these one hundred are "notables;" fifty are "distinguished;" twenty-five are eminent.
A large body of them are "conveyancers" growing thin in person and thinner in mind over deeds and titles; a larger body "attorneys"—getters up and supervisors of suits—providers of ammunition for "distinguished counsel" to discharge with loud reports (the said counsel brilliant by the flash: the attorney obscured in the smoke); many, very many, chained to "larcenies" at the Sessions, "landlord dispossessions" at the Marine Court, suits on butcher's bills at Ward Courts, or "malicious prosecutions" in the Common Pleas.
Yet there are hundreds of coral reefs and pearls for persevering divers in this ocean of litigation. Three thousand pending cases every month are three thousand nutshells[pg 176] where the meat is often fresh and oily, even with the weary keeping on the calendar for months and years. There are some counsel who pocket fees and costs to the tune of twenty thousand a year. We know many a Quirk, Gammon and Snap, who realize an undoubted "ten thousand a year," with no Tittlebat Titmouse for a standing annoyance. And we can taper off on the finger many who do not realize five hundred a year, and work like negro slaves at that: they are continually rough hewing, but no divinity shapes their ends.
Five years of "starvation," and five more years of toil and trouble, constitute the depth of a lawyer's slough of despond in New-York; to say nothing of the giants' castles to storm upon the way, or the fights with the Apolyons of Envy. Obviously so!
A man now-a-days will let a young Sawbones advise ice for his child's croup, or even experiment with his own much-abused liver, when he would not intrust a young attorney with the suing a note where ten witnesses saw the note signed and the "consideration money" paid over. And if the public really knew how much danger their pockets were in when the "buttons" were under the control of inexperienced lawyers, the number of "starvers" would be doubled. What "eminent" lawyer is there who does not look back to the "practice" of his youth, in perfect terror to witness the mistakes he made, as the helmsman, who has scudded through the breakers to the open sea, glances back at the dangers he escaped?