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removal to Atlanta. Three children blessed this union, Misses Maude, Janet and Bessie Tompkins, who now live in Atlanta. Some ten years ago, Judge Tompkins was again married, his second wife being Miss Nora Palmer, a niece of Georgia's gifted and distinguished son, General Robert Toombs. This lady and two sons, Henry and Lawrence, survive.

Judge Tompkins was one of the most prominent of Georgia lawyers. He was able and learned in the law, a hard student, a cultured gentleman, a man of indomitable energy, zeal and courage, ardently devoted to literature; he was charming in companionship.

While cultivating a taste for those things which made him a social factor, he yet gave all necessary attention to the duties of an arduous law practice; and during his professional life he commanded the respect and confidence of his fellow men.

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MATTHEW JAMES PEARSOLL.

MATTHEW JAMES PEARSOLL was born in the County of Sampson; State of North Carolina, on the 30th day of June, 1868, where he resided until the year 1892, when he came to Georgia and entered upon the study of law, in the office of Littlejohn & Thomson, in the City of Cordele.

After leaving the University of North Carolina in 1890, and before removing to this State, he was for two years engaged in journalism.

At Americus, Ga., on May 30th, 1893, after a creditable examination before the Hon. William H. Fish, then Judge of the Superior Courts of the Southwestern Circuit, he was admitted to the bar.

At once he made his home in Moultrie, Colquitt County, embarking in the practice of his chosen profession, and so continued to the day of his tragic death.

In the year 1894, the subject of this sketch entered into copartnership with Robert L. Shipp, a fellow student of the law. This union became a leading law firm of that section of the State,

under the name of Pearsoll & Shipp, and so continued to its dissolution, by death of its senior member.

He was twice appointed by the late Governor Atkinson Solicitor of the County Court of Colquitt, and last fall was appointed Solicitor of the City Court of that young and rapidly-growing South Georgia city, Moultrie.

Most ably and admirably did he meet the requirements of these positions of honor and trust. At the time of the sudden and lamentable taking off of this high-toned, chivalrous and honorable gentleman, he was president of Moultrie's Board of Education.

He held exalted stations in the ranks of a number of prominent fraternal orders. He was a Knight of Pythias and High Priest of the Royal Arch Chapter of Free and Accepted Masons.

He was a consistent member of the Presbyterian Church-a deacon of that body.

He was on the Directory Board of several corporations. Among his clientelle were quite a number of the largest industrial organizations in that section.

We use no fulsome praise when we speak of him as a man of the tenderest sympathies, generous, charitable, courteous and extremely considerate of the rights of others. While loyal to a degree to every personal trust, his practice of a high and honorable profession recognized every just right of opposing and clashing interests.

Able and diligent in the conduct of his client's cause, he sought no advantage for that client, which would be gained at the price of injustice to the opposing party.

With a high and honorable conception of professional ethics, able and learned in the law, extremely cautious in the preparation of his cases, possessing, in a marked degree, that great power of discrimination, he was regarded as the peer of any member of the Bar in his section of the State.

How universally he was esteemed and beloved, is fully attested by the fact that when his death was announced in the town and county where was no drop of kindred blood, in the public streets of that town strong men wept.

Mr. Pearsoll never married. His nearest surviving relativesare Hon. P. M. Pearsoll, of Raleigh, Private Secretary to Governor Aycock; his sister, Miss Kate Pearsoll, and his uncle, Dr. P. L. Murphey, Superintendent of the State Sanitarium of North Carolina; the latter two now residing at Morgantown, N. C.

By reason of the ravages of the war, the subject of this notice was reared in poverty. He was, to all intents and purposes, using the homespun phraseology of the day, a "self-made man." By a life of sobriety and morality, of prudence and toil, he amassed a considerable estate.

On the morning of the 7th of May of the present year, this truly lovable man, able lawyer and patriotic citizen, in the forceful yet pathetic phrase of the Western plains-men, "went over the great divide."

APPENDIX K.

DUE PROCESS OF LAW.

ANNUAL ADDRESS BY

ALTON B. PARKER,

CHIEF JUDGE OF THE COURT OF APPEALS OF NEW YORK.

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The source of the famous phrase, "due process of law," which has place in the Constitution of the United States and in most of the State Constitutions, is to be found in that well-remembered Palladium of English liberty, Magna Charta, and resides in the words, "the law of the land," found in that instrument. The two phrases, "due process of law," and "the law of the land,' have long been treated as synonymous, although the former is the more comprehensive. Coke, in his Second Institute (50) considers them equivalent phrases. So we see that many generations before the organization of our American institutions the phrase, "due process of law," had outgrown its early significance, it probably having had reference to rules of procedure in courts of law in cases in which personal and property rights were involved, and had developed so as to embrace within its meaning the older phrase, "the law of the land." Concerning the latter phrase, lex terrae, as originally expressed in the Latin of the Great Charter, it referred to the customary or common law, which Englishmen had ever assumed to be their inalienable birthright. This feeling was ingrained in the constitution of the English mind and has asserted itself upon various occasions, the most momentous perhaps being the memorable day at Runnymede, when on the 15th of June, 1215, the barons, clergy, and commons of England were led by that illustrious man, Archbishop Stephen (181)

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Langton, in their successful effort to coerce the King, John of England, to restore to the people of England the rights that he had usurped, by affixing his signature to the Great Charter there submitted to him by the militant nobles of his realm.

This mead of praise to Langton is given because, although Robert Fitzwalter, Earl of Dunmore, was chosen Marshal of "The Army of God and the Holy Church," the Archbishop selected the model for and drew up the instrument whose granting they had assembled to demand, led the inharmonious elements there collected to secure it, and headed the list of signers. And at this point I ask your pardon for digressing so far as to call your attention to the deep debt of gratitude English-speaking peoples owe to that warlike churchman Langton; for although he is said by Hume to have been "obtruded on the nation by a palpable encroachment of Rome," that historian also says that he "ought always to be respected by the English." Langton fearlessly reproved and threatened the King for his misdeeds, and even when the Pope himself appealed in his behalf, Langton calmly ignored the appeal. Again, we find him in the year 1223 as ready to lead the men of England against Henry III., the son of John, to compel him to confirm the Great Charter, as he had been to assume leadership in the movement that eight years before had forced his father to grant it.

We are, of course, all aware that Magna Charta was not the first charter granted to Englishmen by their sovereigns. William of Normandy, in the fourth year of the conquest, granted a charter in which provision was made for the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers, which was a radical departure from the conditions that had so long obtained under the common law. The Great Charter itself was constructed by Archbishop Langton, he using as a model the text of the charter that Henry I. had introduced upon his accession to the throne in A. D. 1100, and which was afterward renewed by Stephen and Henry II. The Archbishop followed the arrangement of the charter of the first Henry, and the principles embodied in it were found adequate for the purposes of the revolting barons in 1215, and easily made to include the manifold new rights and duties that had grown

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