The Bench and Bar of Illinois, Vol. 1

Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Bench and Bar of Illinois, Vol. 1: Historical and Reminiscent It may be recalled that in the prospectus of this work there appeared the following words, which, per se, stand in justification of the history of the Bench and Bar of Illinois: "The memory of the life of even a lawyer is fleeting - a name written upon the sandy shore of time, effaced by the oncoming wave of the next generation; his work is for the present, and unless some effort is made to preserve in permanent form a record of that work it will be lost to the future. Even the great judges are forgotten; they live only in the pages of dry and musty reports, and then the recollection is only a shadow. In no better way can some of the most valued items in the history of the lives of such men be preserved than through the medium of such a work. Thus may the merits and virtues of those eminent in the profession be recorded for the emulation and guidance of the younger generation." In the compilation of the work the editor and the publishers have fully recognized the magnitude of the task set them, and in the collation of material for the same there has been a constant aim to use a wise discrimination in regard to the selection of subjects and the methods of treatment. The province of the work is entirely aside from technical lines, and the subject-matter is presented in a style which is mainly reminiscent, though due recognition is accorded the contemporaries of the bench and bar of this end-of-the-century period. In the compilation recourse has been had to divers authorities, including various histories and historical collections, and implying an almost endless array of papers and documents, both public and private. That so much matter could be gathered from so many original sources and then sifted and assimilated for the production of a single work without incurring a modicum of errors and inaccuracies-, would be too much to expect of any corps of writers, no matter how able they might be as statisticians or skilled as compilers of such works. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.