Expenditures-vouchers attached: Expense of banquet of 1898.... . $256.00 D. A. Valentine, printing 1,000 copies of proceedings and programs.. 250.50 A. A. Godard, Treasurer, postage and record book C. J. Brown, Secretary, postage and expenses. Balance on hand $156.81. Total expenditures, 5.00 13.50 16.35 26.50 $596.85 The memorial committee, through J. W. Green, its chairman, reported to the association that, since its last meeting, death had removed six of its most distinguished members-all prominent and highly respected lawyers of this state: R. B. Spilman, A. M. F. Randolph, J. R. Hallowell, W. C. Webb, E. A. McMath and R. G. Robinson; and as a part of its report the committee presented a sketch of the life, and tribute to the memory, of each of the deceased brothers which had been contributed at the request of the committtee by personal friends. These several personal memorials were adopted as the expression of the Association of its high estimate of the life and character of the deceased members, and of its sense of loss through their death. Memorial to R. B. Spilman, BY THE MEMORIAL COMMITTEE OF THE BAR OF RILEY COUNTY. Be it forever remembered that, at this hour, this Association pauses in the performance of all other duties to express in loving and lasting words our high appreciation and heartfelt esteem for our late Judge, the Hon. R. B. Spilman, who received promotion to the supreme court on high on the evening of October 19, 1898. A. D. Judge Spilman was first appointed to preside over the 21st Judicial District by Governor Martin, in the year 1885, and continued in the discharge of that high duty up to the hour of his death, to the perfect satisfaction of both the bar and the people. Born in the then wilds of Indiana on August 17, 1840, his life was that of a pioneer in the development of the great west. In his young manhood he devoted himself to his country and its flag by years of hard service on the field of battle, retiring from that great civil conflict with the well earned title of captain of Co. K., 86th Indiana Infantry. He was admitted to practice the profession of the law at Crawfordsville, Indiana, in March, 1866, and immediately thereafter moved forward with the resistless tread of advancing civilization to his last earthly home on the broad plains and in the clear sunshine of Kansas. Soon he brought to that home in the "beautiful city" his beloved helpmate, Hannah Russell Spilman, to whom he was married on May 14th, 1868. Here was builded and consecrated a home and a household ever full of all that was loving and noble in human conduct; here was practiced in quiet simplicity all those Christian virtues typical of the better life; here have grown the children under the gentle guidance toward perfect manhood and hood, now the objects of our special sympathy and interest; here, surrounded woman by her loving children, dwells that beloved wife, the widow, sustained, we hope, by our sincere sympathy in her loneliness and her grief. While his great life was hers, yet by reason of its very greatness, it extended far beyond that household, and we beg the privilege to sympathize and mourn with her; to assure her and her children of our deep interest in them as the loved ones of him whom we so much esteemed and now seek to honor. For all the years of his life prior to his call to the bench, Judge Spilman was prominently and closely connected with all public affairs. He was recognized as a safe and conscientious practitioner of the law. He was identified with all the educational interests of his city and county, and was always a recognized pillar of strength in the church of which he was a member. He served as county superintendent of schools, several years as city attorney, and at an important period, guided the affairs of his city as mayor; for over thirteen years he served his home county as prosecuting attorney, retiring from this important office to accept the call to the bench. Having assumed the judicial ermine in his district, his whole life was devoted to the conscientious performance of every duty incumbent upon an honest and upright judge. His honesty was unquestioned; his integrity universally recognized; his high judicial attainments conceded by bench and bar alike, while his impartiality, his fairness and his patience in dealing with questions submitted to him, won the perfect confidence of attorneys and litigants. Therefore in perpetual commemoration, be it Resolved, by this Bar Association of the State of Kansas, that, we shall ever hold in memory an appreciative recollection of our judge and shall always cherish his conduct and the faithful discharge of his duties as typical of all that could be desired of one in such position. That it shall be our purpose to emulate his virtues and maintain the high standing of courts of justice pleasing to his conception of the administration of the law, and that, "We hope to see our pilot face to face When we have crossed the bar." Memorial to W. C. Webb, BY G. C. CLEMENS. Who can write a sketch of a lawyer's lawyer life? His deeds are written, not in the dust, but beneath it; and often the curious of the next generation must search in vain for more of the greatest lawyer than his mere name. His proudest forensic achievements, as brave, as potent, as the achievements of the great warrior whose exploits are upon every schoolboy's tongue, and often more enduring, too, are witnessed by only a few of his brethren at the bar and upon the bench and leave no trace upon the memory of the public. Who of today has read a brief of Romily, of Erskine, of Scarlett, of Brougham, of Grattan? Who knows ought of the forensic battles of Patrick Henry, the greatest American advocate of his day? Lawyers cite and judges peruse the reports of the United States Supreme Court of the first half century of the Republic and admire the virile ratiocination of the able members of that "more than amphictyonic council," for it is a legal superstition that "there were giants in those days:" but lawyers and judges alike pass utterly unnoticed the name-for seldom more than his name is there-of the Webster, the Wirt, the Rawle, or the Pickney, whose labor and whose mighty force of intellect produced the opinions for which credit is given to a Marshall or a Story alone. Webster's political speeches are extant and a few of his jury speeches; but who reads the powerful arguments which, through the Federal Supreme Court's decisions moulded the government, and gave birth to constitutional doctrines which for weal or woe rule American legislation today? If death end not all, but, as I like to believe, those gone before still take an interest in the affairs of this world, a Shakespeare, or even a blind Homer, dead so long the learned doubt he ever lived, may look back and see his works perused and his name a household word in every civilized land on the globe; but the lawyer labors of the lawyer of even the last generation are already scarce known, and fortunate indeed will be the now living lawyer who, unless it is preserved from oblivion by triumphs elsewhere than in the forum, shall have so much as his name remembered two generations hence. Even great judges are forgotten. How many of the Lord Chancellors or the Chief Justices of England can the English lawyer name without glancing at “Campbell's Lives"? Marshall and Story, remembered as great judges, and Taney, remembered for his merciless slave-driver logic; besides these three, how many of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States before the Civil War are known to the American lawyers today? Yet not a judge has ever sat upon bench of a court of last resort for one short year but has left upon his country or his state an impression to help make or mar its destiny; not a judge of a court of last resort but in some unread opinion has written a tragedy as pathetic as ever a Sophocles wrote-a tragedy of some home or scul. As to reporters, alas! they are but names, and, in these days, unnoticed names. We know Johnson's reports; we remember Wheaton and Peters; Wallace and Otto are not yet strange upon lawyer lips; but lately we know only the number on the volume; we scarce ever think of the poor, patient plodder who compiled it in travail. Does this seem a novel introduction to a dead lawyer's memorial? Novel it may be, but all know it is painfully true. And it finds apt illustration in the career of this sketch's subject. Judge W. C, Webb, who died at his home in Topeka, April 19, 1898, had spent over thirty years at the Kansas bar as a conspicuous member of that bar. He was for some years a judge. Fifteen volumes of the Kansas Supreme Court reports bear his name as reporter. As a lawyer. he was engaged in some of the most important and widely interesting Kansas cases argued during more than a quarter of a century. But, as a rule, the occasions which gave rise to those law suits have passed already from the memory of the public, from even the memory of the bar; and his work as lawyer, reporter and judge lies buried in the great charnel house where the labors of all lawyers before him lie forgotten; where the work of all lawyers after him will lie forgotten, too. It were vain to seek to recall his lawyer labors to memory here; for these lawyer records preserved by this association will fare as all other lawyer records and be themselves forgotten by even the few who will ever know them at all. No lawyer lives, as a lawyer, a life that can be written or preserved. In other fields he may win lasting laurels and may bind the exotic bays upon his forensic brow and thus come to be remembered by posterity as a lawyer in his day. The forum witnesses the bravest battles of intellect known anywhere in this world, and often for the noblest causes of conflict, too; but the forum is a cemetery of fame, which yields not up its dead and to which even the resurrection trump will be but silence deep. What use were it, then, to speak of a dead brother lawyer as a lawyer? We who knew him can remember of Judge Webb what was said of another "He toiled terribly." He was tireless, unsparing of himself, in the preparation of his cases. He was dogmatic, opinionated, as good lawyers are |