678 JEREMIAH MASON Somerset Maugham, Whose Career As a Master of the Art and Craft of Writing Has Been Inspired by a Passion
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678 JEREMIAH MASON ROY ST. GEORGE STUBBS Winnipeg Somerset Maugham, whose career as a master of the art and craft of writing has been inspired by a passion for perfec- tion, confides, "Before I start writing a novel, I read Candide over again so that I may have in the back of my mind the touchstone of that lucidity, grace and wit". The lawyer, inspired by a similar passion, could not do better than to read an argument of Jeremiah Mason before beginning the preparation of a case. In Mason he will find a model in whom are combined qualities as admirable as those sterling qualities which Somerset Maugham admired in Voltaire. With such a model before his mind, his battle should be well begun. One of the giants of the American Bar in the infancy of his country, and an advocate whose name can be mentioned in the same breath as the names of the greatest advocates of any time or place, Jeremiah Mason is today almost a forgotten man. The reason for his neglect can be readily explained. His best energies were given to his labours in the law, and time deals harshly with the lawyer who makes his profession his first and last love, for it can find nothing tangible to seize. The lawyer's achievements are written in water. They must be supported by activity in other fields of endeavour if they are to be preserved for posterity. Mason's great contemporaries, Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, who still occupy front pews in the Temple of History, had a wholesome respect for him. They had reason to know his worth for they broke many a lance with him in the courts and counted it no disgrace to be unhorsed by so worthy a foe. "Of the present bar of the United States", said Daniel Webster when his own star was at its zenith, "I think I am able to form a pretty fair opinion, having an intimate personal knowledge of them in the local and federal courts; and this I can say, that I regard Jeremiah Mason as eminently superior to any other lawyer whom I ever met. I should rather, with my own experience (and I have had some pretty tough experi- ence with him), meet them all combined in a case, than to meet him alone and singlehanded . He was the keenest lawyer that I ever met or read about. If a man had Jeremiah Mason, and he did not get his case, no human ingenuity or learning could get it." 1946] Jeremiah Mason I 679 Rufus Choate's opinion of Mason was equally high. Speaking to the Bar of the County pf Suffolk a few days after Mason's death, he said, "It seems to me, that one of the very greatest men whom this country has produced; a statesman among the foremost in a Senate, of which King, and Giles, and Gore, in the fullness of their strength and fame, were members; a jurist who would have filled the seat of Marshall as Marshall filled it ; of whom it maybe said, that, without ever holding judicial station, he was the author and finisher of the jurisprudence of a State; one whose intellect, wisdom, and uprightness gave him a control over the opinions of all the circles in which he lived and acted, of which we shall scarcely see another example, and for which this generation and the country are the better today: -such seems tome to have been the man who has just gone down to a timely grave." Jeremiah Mason was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, on 27th April, 1765. He came of fine New England stock. As Dr. Wendell Holmes once said, a man is -an omnibus in which all his ancestors are seated. Jeremiah Mason, like George Washington and many another of the giants of early American history, was hewn from the same rock as his ancestors but he was cut on a larger scale. In him their virtues were magnified and their talents carried to . a higher degree of perfection. Mason's childhood was lived in stirring times. Pulses beat fast with indignation and determined men asserted, " Millions for self-government But for .tribute never a cent." That feeble politician, Lord North, was doing his best to lose the proudest jewel in Britain's colonial crown. The stage was being set for the drama of the American Revolution. In his seventy-seventh year Mason wrote a fragment of autobiography in which he says. that his first definite recollec- tion was his memory of the excitement, brought into his life by the Battle of Lexington, fought when he was seven years old. The Revolution cast a direct shadow over his home for his father served in the Revolutionary Army as a colonel in com- mand of a company of minute ,men. During the troubled days when the Thirteen Colonies were struggling to become the masters of their own destiny, many things went by the boards. Education was one of the first to be affected. It was neglected for more immediate problems-such as keeping the wolf from the door and a roof 680 The Canadian Bar Review [Vol. XXIV overhead . Until he was fourteen Jeremiah Mason had but nine months schooling, and that under teachers who should have been at school themselves. In 1782, with his entry as a pupil at Master Tisdale's School in Lebanon, his education was put on a full-time schedule for the first time. Two years later he was admitted as a Freshman at Yale College. In those less favoured days only those who wanted an education got one and no time was lost in the process of getting it. University courses were not designed to meet the lowest common denominator of a nondescript lot of students. A student's first reason for being at college was to eat of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Football, and such delights of later years, had not yet come into their own. Mason had industry and a powerful mind. Driven by an inner compulsion, he made the best of his opportunity at Yale to fill in the most obvious gaps in his knowledge. His best subjects were Latin and Mathematics and his worst, strange to say, was English. Try as he did, he never completely mastered the mysteries of English grammar. Discipline came too late. Careless habits of expression had been confirmed by long usage. He never became a polished orator, but nature gave him a force- ful personality and assiduous practice developed in him great powers of speech, which were refreshed and enriched by the frequent use of idiom and the apt colloquial expression. Little blessed with the soft graces of speech himself, he had no patience with the rich tapestries of eloquence that so delighted his word-intoxicated friend, Rufus Choate. He believed that the matter of a speech is the all-important thing. -In a letter of advice he wrote to his daughter, Mary E. Mason, while she was at school, he gives his declaration of faith on the theme of getting one's thoughts across : "After reading and thinking on the subject on which you are to write, express your ideas, in the first instance, rapidly and boldly, as they occur. The great object is to secure the ideas; this must be done without much attention to their dress. You may afterwards, at leisure, dress them in the most appropriate language you can, and if necessary, new-model the sentences. This however is a matter of minor importance. If you have good strong ideas, you will soon learn to express them well enough. In attempting composition you must not suffer yourself to be restrained by diffidence, or false delicacy, but exert boldly all the powers you have." Iri other words-catch your rabbit before you put the pot on the stove to make rabbit soup. 1946] Jeremiah blason ' 681 At commencement exercises, 'when he was graduated from Yale, Jeremiah Mason gave the first demonstration of his ability to handle himself in a war of words. As his part in the exercises he was assigned the task of debating that perennial subject of debate : Is society ever justified in using the weapon of capital punishment in dealing with a criminal offender? He was arguing against the spirit of the times for the ancient precedent of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth had not yet been overruled by the verdict of science. Borrowing his points from Beccaria, the father of modern criminology, who was having a great vogue at the time, he dressed them in the plain garments of his own vigorous speech and won the debate hands down. His heart had been in his brief for he did not believer in capital punishment. As a boy of ten he had witnessed a public hanging and, as he once confided to his daughter, he could not go to bed for years without thinking of the awful spectacle that had shocked his youthful eyes. While a student at Yale, Mason formed the habit of drop- ping into the courts in New Haven whenever he felt that he could steal an hour from his books. The courts were then a focal point in the community, occupying the place in the public affections now shared by the radio, the motion-picture- houses and the sport stadiums. Lawyers played an influential role in community life. And they played it well. Individuals all, they lived in a society that allowed them plenty of room to expand their personalities .