BOOKS.
JOSEPH CHOATE.* Ma. STRONG does not profess to have written a complete or, on the domestic and social side, an authorized biography of Mr. Choate, but within the limits laid down in his Introduction he has given us
an extremely valuable and discriminating study of the career of a great American. As an old friend and as a lawyer frequently asso- ciated with him at the Bar, Mr. Strong was personally and pro- fessionally well fitted for his task. He was also provided by Mr. Choate with useful materials in the shape of a fra.gm,ent of auto- biography and scrap-books containing full reports of the speeches and addresses delivered when he was Ambassador. Of these Mr. Strong has made liberal, perhaps too liberal, use. The extracts are too numerous and too long ; there is a certain amount of repetition, and the arrangement of the book leaves something to be desired. But it would be most unfair to describe it as a scissors-and-paste compilation, or an act of unqualified hero-worship. Mr. Strong combines faithful criticism with well-founded admiration. The book is better than the title, Joseph H. Choate : a Great Anibassador. It proves Mr. Choate to have been that and a great deal more besides—the leading Court lawyer of his time, a man of high character, great fearlessness, and independence, a brilliant wit and a delightful humorist, and above all a great New Englander. At Harvard he was a contemporary and admirer of Phillips Brooks and of Mr. Carter, the famous lawyer, a rival in the Courts and a lifelong friend. When he graduated in 1852, as fourth scholar in the class of which his brother William was first, the President's wife told his mother that, instead of coming by train and omnibus from Salem to Cambridge, she ought to have come in a chariot drawn by two peacocks. From the Harvard Law School he went to study law with a Boston firm, and in 1855, as the result of a strong recommendation from his distinguished kinsman, Rufus Choate, entered the office of Butler, Evarts, and Southmayd in Now York, becoming a partner in 1839, with an assured income of £600 a year.
Mr. Choate's rise from junior partner of a great firm of lawyers - to be the leading Court lawyer of his time is traced in a long and
interesting chapter. He owed a very great deal, as he freely acknowledged, to his senior partners, men of great ability, experience, sagacity, and legal knowledge. Indeed, we gather that he did not approach either of them in the last-named particular, and that his knowledge of the law was largely acquired orally in consultation with his partners. But he was more of a man of the world than either of them, and better equipped for Court practice ; he was a great advo- cate, cross-examiner, and verdict-winner. Moreover, the conditions of the time were still favourable to the Court lawyer. Great eases are now fought and won in offices, and no longer before juries and appellate tribunals. Mr. Strong gives a full account of the chief cases in which Mr. Choate was engaged, with long extracts exempli- fying his methods, culminating in his greatest triumph—the success- ful attack on the constitutionality of the Income Tax law before the Supreme Court, though Mr. Choate himself acknowledged that Mr. Southmayd, who never went near the Court, but prepared the brief, really won the case. The illustrations of his method as a cross-examiner do not always bear out Mr. Strong's contention as to his considerateness for witnesses, though they abundantly prove his wit and resourcefulness. But the chapter as a whole reveals him in the light of a lawyer who was in love with his pro. fession, and had the highest conception of the services which a lawyer could render to his country and his race.
Biographically considered, the two chapters on Mr. Choate as a
New Englander and a New Yorker are the most valuable in the book. He gloried in his birth and his antecedents, in Salem and Harvard, and, for all his long association with New York, remained a typical New Englander to the close ; industrious, persevering, thrifty, self-reliant, independent. Underneath his genial bonhomie there was a substratum of New England granite. He had hosts of friends and admirers but few intimates. People spoke of Joe Choate, but Mr. Strong does not think that any lawyer ever called him Joe. He was essentially an aristocrat, charming in manner but with an • Joseph Choate : a Great Ambassador. By Theron G. Strong. London : Cassell tid Co. I15s. noel
impenetrable reserve, tolerant, but no inviter of confidences, "He was not one whom people would be likely to seek out for sympathy and consolation in times of trouble." This personal aloofness, however, was combined with a keen sense of duty, high public spirit, and a scrupulous regard for professional ethics. Here as in his daily life he followed the teachings of a genuine New England conscience and reflected the moral qualities of his Puritan ancestry. Already in the " sixties " he MIS a
prominent member of the New England Society and a "star speaker at their gatherings. Mr. Strong quotes freely from his speeches to illustrate his engaging audacity in personalities, his satire on New York from the New England standpoint, and his humorous passages of arms, in which he generally gave better than he got. And he closes the chapter by recalling how, while Ambas- sador at St. James's, he paid his thserripta to his University by erecting a memorial window at St. Saviour's, Southwark, to Harvard, who had been born and baptized in that parish. The chapter on Mr. Choate as a New Yorker opens with a vivid picture of his appearance and manner—his deceptive nonchalance and apparent want of seriousness. Ho was not a controversialist., and clid not initiate reforms, though supporting them valiantly ; his friend and rival Carter thought he lacked moral indignation ; yet in spite of his conservatism, he kept abreast of the times, and when chal- lenged was courageous in expressing his opinion. Though absorbed in his profession, he was never a cut-and-dried lawyer, read om- nivorously, and stored up his reading in a retentive memory. As we have seen, he dealt freely in personalities, and "excelled from the first in a sort of light and fleeting audacity," which was seldom resented. His famous speech on St. Patrick's Day, 1893, was an exception, and excited tho fury of Irish-American journals, who never quite forgave him for the suggestion that the best way for the hereditary bondsmen of England to secure their freedom was that they should " all, with their wives and their children, and their children's children, with the spoils they had taken from America in their hands, set their faces homeward, land there and strike the blow." Mr. Choate never repented of this speech. In the last years of his life he said to Mr. Strong : " I advocated Homo Rule in the most sensible and practical manner in which it was ever presented—that the Irish should simply go back and take Ireland, and apply the science of government which they had learned in America." Mr. Choate had no respect for Tammany Hall, and when attacked by Mr. Croker as a rich man's lawyer, turned the tables on him with overwhelming effect.
The stories of his wit are well known ; perhaps the happiest of all his sayings was that in reply to the question who he would like to ho if he could not be himself : " Mrs. Choate's second husband " ; the most effective of the retorts was when he hoisted Chauncey Depew with his own gas company. He could enjoy a joke at his own expense, but he was nearly always equal to any occasion.
Of his Ambassadorship it is enough to say that he was ubiquitous
and indefatigable in maintaining and strengthening Anglo-American friendship, wise in council, a delightful companion, and n constant joy to those who heard him in public. Never was his public spirit more finely shown than after his return from his Ambassadorship—the most useful period of his life, accord- ing to Mr. Strong. He was indeed New York's "first citizen," though he turned the title against himself by a humorous reference to Shakespeare. At the Hague in 1907 he was described by a French journalist as the enfant terrible of the Conference, shattering grandiloquent bubbles with cold ridicule and brief logic. For (ho last three years of his life his mind was almost completely absorbed in the war. A whole-hearted and passionate supporter of the Allies, declining to be neutral, realizing from the outset what the war meant, he welcomed the entry of his country into the struggle with profound relief. In his own moving words : "For the first time, after two years and a half, I was able to hold up my head as high as the weight of eighty-five years would allow."
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