Life, 1917-06-07 · page 9 of 42
Life — June 7, 1917 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page features an article about Mr. Choate, described as a successful lawyer and prominent American figure. The illustration shows a woman in Victorian dress leaning toward a man, with a caption reading "And yet father told me to-day he thought you lacked application." The satire appears to target Choate's reputation and social standing. The text discusses how his success in law contrasts with broader philosophical questions about life's purpose—distinguishing between maintaining existence and understanding it. The woman's comment about "lacking application" creates ironic humor, given Choate's documented professional success. The piece uses Choate as a vehicle to explore class distinctions, American democracy versus European aristocracy, and whether professional achievement alone constitutes a complete life.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Mr. Choate HERE is beer in the world, and there is champagne. There are Fords, and there are Packards. To cach its qualities, and hats off to them! We must not blame a Ford for not being a Packard, nor yet a Packard for not being a Ford. The hardest thing one can think of to say of Mr. Choate was that he was’ a successful man. Prodigiously suc- cessful, to be sure! Moreover, he was a successful lawyer, and one has to consider in summing him up how great a man it is possible for a successful lawyer to be. He was devoted to his profession, liked it, excelled in it, prac- ticed it to admiration and to profit. If there is anything about being a suc- cessful lawyer that holds a man back from greatness, we may look for illus- tration of it in Mr. Choate. There are two great concerns of life: the apparatus of living and the end of existence. The minister’s errand is to keep existence directed towards its proper end; the lawyer's, to regulate the apparatus of living. These pur- poses need not conflict. They run parallel, and usually are inter-related. There are people who never get behind the mechanisms of life... They may be ever so good at making them work right, and still have no illuminating ap- preciation of the purpose of their ac- tivities. There are others whose minds are so absorbed in speculations about the celestial intentions that they grudge due thought to bread and butter. Mr. Choate never neglected the necessaries. He belonged to the Carnal party in politics, and was a wonderfully good hand at the apparatus of living. He understood pretty well how it ought to work, and had persuasions the most efficacious to make it work that way. He seemed never to see law larger than life, as some lawyers do. He saw it, doubtless, as a road on which life may travel, and which, like all roads, needs constant attention. Where life was going on it seemed not so much to concern him, and in that he was quite different from Mr. John Bigelow, his predecessor as first citizen of New York, who was a Celestial in politics, and had boundless curiosity about the soul. He: 1 COULD GO ON KISSING YOU FOREVER. “ AND YET FATHER TOLD ME TO-DAY HE THOUGHT YOU LACKED APPLICATION.” He came to be one of the most in- teresting examples of American civili- zation. In England he would have come, no doubt, to be a law-lord with a seat among the Peers, and even here we had come to think of him as a member of the aristocracy. So he was, in a way, as is every highly distin- guished American, but he was also as good a democrat as a Yankee could be who was born in Salem. It cannot be said that he was of humble origin, because the imagination declines to pic- ture a humble Choate, but his father was a doctor, and so far from rich that his exploit of keeping four sons at once in Harvard College seemed to his son Joseph to be little short of miracu- lous. Joseph was a high scholar in college, and afterwards studied two years in the Harvard Law School, and then came to New York, about five comicbooks.com