id="Page_32" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 32]"/> reached the warm and virile splendor of Erskine, or the weighty magnificence of Webster. Van Buren's work as a lawyer brought him, however, something besides wealth and the education and refinement of books, and something which neither Erskine nor Webster gained. The profession afforded him an admirable discipline in the conduct of affairs; and affairs, in the law as out of it, are largely decided by human nature and its varying peculiarities. The preparation of details; the keen and far-sighted arrangement of the best, because the most practicable, plan; the refusal to fire off ammunition for the popular applause to be roused by its noise and flame; the clear, steady bearing in mind of the end to be accomplished, rather than the prolonged enjoyment or systematic working out of intermediate processes beyond a utilitarian necessity,—all these elements Van Buren mastered in a signal degree, and made invaluable in legal practice. To men more superbly equipped for tours de force, who ignored the uses of long, attentive, varied, painstaking work, there was nothing admirable in the methods which Van Buren brought into political life out of his experience in the law. He was, to undisciplined or envious opponents, a "little magician," a trickster. The same thing appears, in every department of human activity, in the anger which failure often flings at success.

The predominance of lawyers in our politics was very early established, and has been a characteristic distinction between politics in England and politics in America. Conspicuous as lawyers have been in the politics of the older country, they have rarely been figures of the first rank. They have served in all its modern ministries, and sometimes in other than professional stations; but, with the unimportant exception of Perceval, not as the chief. English opinion has not unjustly believed its greater landed proprietors to be animated with a strong and peculiar desire for English greatness and renown; nor has the belief been destroyed by their frequent opposition to the most beneficent popular movements. Among these proprietors and those allied with them, even when not strictly in their ranks, England has found her statesmen. To this day, the speech of a lawyer in the British House of Commons is fancied to show the narrowness of technical training, or is treated as a bid for promotion to some of the splendid seats open to the English bar. In America, the great landed proprietor very early lost the direction of public affairs. All the members of the "Virginian dynasty" were, it is true, large land-owners, and in the politics of New York there were several of them. But land-ownership was to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe simply a means of support while they attended to public affairs; it was not one of their chief recommendations to the landed interest throughout the country. For a time in the early politics of New York the landed wealth of the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and Livingstons was of itself a source of strength; but in the spread of democratic sentiment it was found that to be a great landlord was entirely consistent with dullness, narrowness, and timid selfishness. Among the landlords there soon and inevitably decayed that sense of public obligation belonging to exalted position and leadership which sometimes brings courage, high public spirit, and even a sound and active political imagination, to those who preside over bodies of tenants. The laws were changed which facilitated family accumulations of land. Since these early years of the century a great land-owner has been in politics little more than any other rich man. Both have had advantages in that as in any other field of activity. Certain easy graces not uncommon to inherited wealth have often been popular,—not, however, for the wealth, but for themselves. Where these graces have existed in America without such wealth, they have been none the less popular; but in England a lifetime of vast public service and the finest personal attainments have failed to overcome the distrust of a landless man as a sort of adventurer.

When Van Buren's career began, the men who were making money in trade or manufactures were generally too busy for the anxious and busy cares of public life; the tradesmen and manufacturers who had already made money were past the time of life when men can vigorously and skillfully turn to a new and strange calling. There was no leisure class except land-owners or retired men of business. Lawyers, far more than those of any other calling, became public men, and naturally enough. Their experience of life and their knowledge of men were large. The popular interest in their art of advocacy; their travels from county seat to county seat; their speeches to juries in towns where no other secular public speaking was to be heard; the varieties of human life which lawyers came to know,—varieties far greater where the same men acted as attorneys and advocates than in England where they acted in only one of these fields,—these and the like, combined with the equipment for the forms of political and governmental work which was naturally gained in legal practice and the systematic study of law, gave to distinguished lawyers in America their large place in its political life. For this place the liberality of their lives helped, besides, to fit them. They had ceased to be disqualified for it by their former close alliance, as in England, with the landed aristocracy; and they had not yet begun to suffer a disqualification, frequently unjust, for their close relations with corporate interests, between which and the public there often arises an antagonism of interests. De Tocqueville, after his visit in 1832, said that lawyers formed in America its highest political class and the most cultivated circle of society; that the American aristocracy was not composed of the rich, but that it occupied the judicial bench and the bar. And the descriptions of the liberal and acute though theoretical Frenchman are generally trustworthy, however often his striking generalizations are at fault. Such, then, was the intimacy of relations between the professions of law and politics when Van Buren shone in both. And when, in his early prime, he gave up the law, neither forensic habits nor those of the attorney were yet too strongly set to permit the easy and complete diversion of his powers to the more generous and exalted activity of public life.

It is simpler thus separately to treat Van Buren's life as a lawyer, because in a just view of the man it must be subordinate to his life as a politician. It is to be remembered, however, that in his earlier years his progress in politics closely attended in time, and in much more than time, his professional progress. When, at thirty, he sat as an appellate judge in the court of errors, he was already powerful in politics; when, at thirty-two, he was attorney-general, he was the leader of his party in the state senate; when, at forty-five, he had perhaps the most lucrative professional practice in New York, he was the leader of his party in the United States Senate. But it will be easier to follow his political career without interruption from his work as a lawyer, honorable and distinguished as it was, and much of his political ability as he owed to its fine discipline.

Van Buren's domestic life was broken up by the death of his wife at Albany, in February, 1819, leaving him four sons. To her memory Van Buren remained scrupulously loyal until his own death forty-three years afterwards. We may safely believe political enemies when, after saying of him many dastardly things, they admitted that he had been an affectionate husband. Nor were accusations ever made against the uprightness and purity of his