Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/53

PRACTICE OF LAW IN NEW YORK CITY, 27 lawyers, whereas in the country districts they must be politicians to succeed as lawyers. Provincial lawyers, even if of distinguished success elsewhere, seem usually to feel a strange necessity to ex- plain why they are not found at the metropolitan bar; yet the out- of-town feeling as to the city bar is so sensitive that a lawyer from this city, no matter how able or prominent, must exercise caution in caring personally for his client's rights before a rural jury. On the other hand, our metropolitan juries neither know nor care where lawyers hail from, and there are now at our bar several men who, after some years of uneventful provincial practice, were trans- planted here to almost immediate distinguished success. Immemorial lay prejudice against our profession must still be faced in New York City. Probably if Jack Cade were to appear here with his unholy purpose of killing off all the lawyers, his fol- lowing would not be small, and would include some really success- ful litigants. People who know nothing, who know little, and who know much, meet on common ground in having their fling at our profession. The burden of this always is that any lawyer will main- tain that black is white, or do much worse, for a fee. The laity forget that the lawyer is the client's reflection, his alter ego, and that our system of trial, however imperfect, is still the most perfect way known among men of determining a question of fact. The system would work perfectly if those who apply were perfect. At- torney and client are the terms of a relation. Human beings in all their variety of moral significance, when in need of a lawyer, match themselves up with lawyers of corresponding moral worth. Thus in this crowded centre the bar must be most heterogeneous in order to supply the demand of this morally much diversified liti- gating public, and a lawyer who has practised long enough to have his character known will finally have a clientage on the whole suiting that character. A layman may not know, and very rarely does know, a lawyer's merit qua lawyer, but the character or repu- tation of his legal adviser he may fairly estimate. Experience jus- tifies the belief that, with few lamentable exceptions, where there is any difference in moral status between lawyer and client, the former is the better of the two. As a rule, the recording angel will do well to keep both eyes on each, and to prepare to weep in case the lawyer ever receives his client's money save under stress of necessity, or holds it from the client one minute longer than he must. He should not allow the client to order this otherwise. The writer has known of instances in which clients have pro-