IN MEMORIAM.

ANTHONY THORNTON.

PROCEEDINGS IN THE SUPREME COURT OF ILLINOIS AT THE APRIL TERM, 1905, OF THAT Court.

The Hon. ANTHONY THORNTON, formerly one of the justices of this court, died at his home in Shelbyville, Illinois, on September 10, 1904. At the April term of the court, 1905, the following memorial proceedings were had:

Hon. George D. Chaffee addressed the court, as follows:

If your Honors please-The bench and bar of Shelby county, at the November term, 1904, of their court, placed a duty upon Gen. H. J. Hamlin and myself to present to the Supreme Court of the State the records of the proceedings of the bar in Shelby county upon the occasion of the meeting of that bar to take proper ceremonies to record the death of the Hon. ANTHONY THORNTon, exjudge of the Supreme Court of the State, who departed this life on the tenth day of September, 1904, aged eighty-nine years and ten months, and we bring here with us, and will leave with the clerk of this court, a certified copy of the proceedings of the bar in the home county of our distinguished brother. In doing this we feel justified in taking some of the time of this honorable court to embalm the memory of this distinguished man so that his long life and valued services to the State of his adoption may be a part of the records of the court which he so honored, and an inspiration to the honorable judges now on the bench, and those who come after them, to emulate his example.

Some, if not all, of the gentlemen now on the bench had more or less intimate acquaintance with Judge THORNTON in his lifetime.

He was a remarkable man. He commenced his practice in the State of Illinois in 1836 and closed it in 1904, covering a period of sixtyeight years. At the time he commenced his practice, Andrew Jackson was president of the United States, and, including him and the president elect, twenty presidents have sat in the executive chair. Thomas Carlin was Governor of the State of Illinois. Since then we have had seventeen Governors, most of whom, if not all, Judge THORNTON knew. At the time he began practice Texas was a foreign country. Joe Smith and the mormons lived at Nauvoo. It is not probable that there was a carriage in the county of Shelby at that time. The telegraph, telephone, electric light and petroleum lamps were unknown and cook stoves were a luxury. The cyclopean eye of the locomotive had never chased the darkness over our prairies. Men rode to mill, to court, to church, and everywhere, on horseback, and their most rapid mode of travel was a rude stage coach. Most of the houses in the country were log and the floors puncheon. Gold had not been discovered in California. The idea of reapers, mowers, threshing machines, sewing machines, etc., had not entered the mind of man. It was twenty-four years after he began practice before the great war of the rebellion darkened and saddened our country.

Judge THORNTON was physically a giant, standing about six feet three inches. His mental powers were equal to his physical powers. He came of old English stock, his ancestors living in Virginia, and he was born in Kentucky. His grandfather was a colonel in the Revolution, and I have often seen his commission, signed by Gov. Patrick Henry. The judge was a well educated man and graduated from Miami University, Ohio. He was a great student all his life in his profession, and was an omniverous reader of current literature and of the best literature of the past. He practiced law under Judges Sidney Breese, Treat, Underwood, Turner, David Davis, Constable, Harlan, Wilson, Shields, Emerson, Gallagher, Rice, Phillips, Vandeveer, Creighton, Shirley, Gross, Farmer, Dwight and Ames. In his extensive practice, covering this long period of years, he came in contact with all of the great men of central Illinois. He had a joint debate with Lincoln at Shelbyville in 1856, and afterwards, in 1860, had a joint debate with Leonard Swett. He says: "Of all the lawyers whom I have ever met, Lincoln was the most marked for fairness and honesty. He was always forcible, and could manage and present a good case with as much power and clearness as any man I ever saw." He was engaged in many interesting murder cases in his early practice, one of which was defending the