XX OBITUARY NOTICES. 



Bradley of the Supreme Court of the United States ; the venerable 

 Chief Justice Beasley of New Jersey, George Harding, the famous 

 patent lawyer who had won the Morse Electric Telegraph case, and 

 the McCormick Reaper case, and the quaint old-fashioned Asa I. 

 Fish, who was physically the counterpart of Mr. Pickwick, and 

 mentally his exact opposite. It was an unusual company for a law 

 student to join, and I listened to a discussion of the famous Slaugh- 

 ter House Cases, but recently decided by the highest tribunal in the 

 nation, where Justices Bradley and Field had dissented from the 

 majority, a discussion which impressed me deeply, so animated had 

 the debate become. Many years later I saw Mr. Dickson on the 

 broad piazzas of the United States Hotel at Saratoga in conversa- 

 tion with E. J. Phelps, of Vermont, and Joseph H. Choate, both of 

 them subsequently ambassadors to Great Britain, and grouped about 

 them were Morefield Storey, of Boston, Simeon E. Baldwin, of Con- 

 necticut, judge, governor and publicist, and John F. Dillon, who left 

 the federal bench to become a renowned advocate before the Su- 

 preme Court of the United States ; James C. Carter, the greatest 

 forensic jurist of his day, and Henry C. Hitchcock, of Missouri, an 

 eminent disciple of the school of John Marshall. It is no wonder 

 then that with such associates Mr. Dickson became " one of the 

 honor men of the Bar of the United States." Indeed, it is known 

 that when, through the death of Chief Justice Waite, a vacancy 

 existed in the highest judicial office of the nation, President Cleve- 

 land seriously contemplated sending Mr. Dickson's name to the 

 Senate, and nothing but a narrow view of his relationship as counsel 

 to great corporations prevented his doing so. 



It is as a leader of the Bar that he must be finally considered. 

 Admitted to the Bar of Philadelphia in 1858, of all the men who 

 were slightly his seniors in standing but seven survived him, and of 

 the fifty-nine men who were admitted in the same year but two re- 

 mained. This impressive fact, while in one sense indicating the av- 

 erage shortness and uncertainty of life, in another illustrated the 

 persistency of his leadership. From 1776 to 1858 — a period of 

 eighty-two years — there were admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 

 all 2,786 men : at the time of his death there were 2,936 names upon 

 the roll of living lawyers. This fact indicated the great growth in 



