Excerpt from An Address on the Life and Services of Hon. Mark Skinner, Ex-Judge of the Cook County Court of Common Pleas, Now the Superior Court of Cook County: Delivered Before the Bar Association of the City of Chicago, Dec. 17, 1887

Hen death has removed from the scene of his labors and triumphs a man whose abilities, learning and virtues have given him a high and commanding position among his associ ates and fellowmen, it is a duty which his survivors owe to themselves to gather up the fragments of his life, that nothing of his example may be lost. This is an obligation binding with peculiar force upon the members of the legal profession since the reputation of an eminent lawyer can only be thor oughly felt and appreciated by his brethren who have shared in his counsels and witnessed his triumphs and defeats. It may be true, as it is sometimes said, that the lives of lawyers are barren of events, but not more so than that of the lives of men engaged in other pursuits or professions, and if their contemporaries and immediate successors were careful to record and transmit memorials of them to posterity, we should not be under the necessity of depending on tradition for what they said and did.

We pause to-day by the grave of one of the pioneers of this city, an honored member of our profession, who, at the open ing of manhood, left his Green Mountain home and joined that great westward-moving throng that were hastening forward to take up their abode on the fertile prairies of that magnificent region which our forefathers in the very morning of our exist ence dedicated to God and Liberty, lying north and west of the Ohio.

Fifty years have come and gone since Mark Skinner, who has just passed away, settled here and with other earnest men helped to lay the foundations of this great city, and to whose enlightened judgment and far-seeing sagacity the present generation is indebted for its prosperity and its commercial supremacy.

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