SIR ROBERT STOUT.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 293, 11 December 1925, Page 9

SIR ROBERT STOUT.

DEVOTION TO IDEALS.

«WOUIB HAVE MADE GREAT EVANGELIST."

INTIMATE SKETCH BY SIR JOHN FESTDLAY. (By Telegraph.—Special to "Star.") WELLINGTON, this day. As a former law partner of the retiring Chief Justice, and a friend from boyhood, Sir John Findlay has contributed to the "New Zealand Fortnightly Law Notes" a personal sketch of Sir Robert Stout full of interesting points. Disvussing his subject's uncompromising determined devotion to his ideals regardless of their popularity, Sir John Findlay declaros: "Had Sir Robert lived in the eleventh century he would have been a valiant crusader, probably leaving his bones whitening before the walls of Jerusalem. Had he lived in the Mayflower days his spirit would have taken him westward with the fugitives who left their- motherland in search of wider liberty. Such a life and its strenuous eonibativeness in the promotion of a cause must inevitably raise that dust, din, and bitterness of battle -which prevent and distort true estimates of the personal character of those engaged in the fray. No man paid in years gone by for his splendid championship of liberty and democracy more in money, mud, and misrepresentation than he whose valiant services for political and individual freedom are now almost forgotten, even by men past middle life. "At the end of next month the need for the proper reticencies and conversational restrictions imposed upon a practising barrister in his private speech with a judge shall have disappeared, and we shall again be able to talk to Sir Robert with a freedom untrammelled by judicial ■ tiqueette. What he then loses in conventional respect lie will more than gain in increased affection, if indeed that be possible, for, as his natural qualities transcended the requisites of his office, so his manifold attributes as a man have given him a higher place in the affections of his friends than any official. eminence could have won for him. The closest analysis of his demeanour, conversation, or conduct could never find the faintest trace of the snob—he has always been too great for that. The metal and not the stamp of rank has always been Ms test of worth. Handling the Barristers. "His has always been a mind of singular alertness, which is seen at its best in argumentative exchanges between him' self and counsel in the Court of Appeal," continued Sir John Findlay. "If it is a junior who is addressing the Court, the Chief Justice is almost coaxingly encouraging, sometimes figuratively taking a young lawyer by the hand and leading him out of a legal blind alley in which he had landed himself, but when a barristerial veteran 'famoused for the fight' is warily treading his way amid fallacies and pitfalls, here attempting to get round his difficulties by the advocate's method of 'vincere circumambulando' and there courageously ignoring them, he suddenly finds himself stopped by the Chief Justice with a series of questions ruthlessly exposing the fallacies of Ms arguments. The barrister attempts to escape from his dilemma by a, series of sid* tracks. It is no use. He is stopped by another series of questions, put with' suoJi emphasis as to clearly .indicate the futility of further sophistries or paralogy. In these encounters the face of the Chief Justice brightens and glows with his enjoyment of the contest. The abler and more esperieneceS. the man at the Bar the more the judge on the bench seems to revel in disputation, from which he usually emerges with the flush of victqfy on his kindly ample brow. There is, however, no intellectual arrogance about him. He will listen with, the fullest patience and atteation to any #Tgument that really deserves a hearing, and, although he has fine courage in his convictions, he is never dogmatic. He is never afraid of his dignity. It is so securely based upon his sincere manhood that the assumption of dignified airs would be entirely foreign to his nature. Careless of appearances, it is typical of Sir Robert's high that he is constitutionally careless of his personal appearance, the eternal verities being considered so much more important than sartorial elegance of the artificial integument. Somefimes before he became Chief Justice it occasionally occurred to mc that he must have slept in his clothes, a fancy at once dissolved by remembering his abstemious manner of life. That after he became Chief Justice he has maintained a habit of dress adequately, if modestly, suitable to his office is by some quite friendly observers ascribed to the solicitous insistancy of his wife.

"All this chimes with his dominating rule of plain living and high thinking. No man is less aloof from his fellows than Sir Robert, but even a small arc of the circle of his conversation convinces you that he lives far ■ more in the spiritual than the material world. In my view, if Sir Robert Stout had not been a great lawyer and a great judge, he would have been an evangelist greater still, whose earnest and eloquent appeals to the souls of men to increasingly spiritualise their lives, and not materialise them, would have been nobler service in the uplift to the nation than even his brilliant and faithful service as judge,"