The lawyer who works his way up from a five-dollar fee in a suit
before a justice of the peace, to a five-thousand-dollar fee
before the Supreme Court of his State, has a long and hard path
to climb. Lincoln climbed this path for twenty-five years, with
industry, perseverance, patience--above all, with that
self-control and keen sense of right and wrong which always
clearly traced the dividing line between his duty to his client
and his duty to society and truth. His perfect frankness of
statement assured him the confidence of judge and jury in every
argument. His habit of fully admitting the weak points in his
case gained him their close attention to his strong ones, and
when clients brought him questionable cases his advice was always
not to bring suit.

"Yes," he once said to a man who offered him such a case; "there
is no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I
can set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can distress a
widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain
for you six hundred dollars, which rightfully belongs, it appears
to me, as much to them as it does to you. I shall not take your
case, but I will give you a little advice for nothing. You seem a
sprightly, energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at
making six hundred dollars in some other way.

He would have nothing to do with the "tricks" of the profession,
though he met these readily enough when practised by others. He
never knowingly undertook a case in which justice was on the side
of his opponent. That same inconvenient honesty which prompted
him, in his store-keeping days, to close the shop and go in
search of a woman he had innocently defrauded of a few ounces of