Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/57

PRACTICE OF LAW IN NEW YORK CITY, 3 1 The young man who to-day enters our profession hereabouts simply on his merits, to win its rewards beginning with a bare living for himself, must face competition at least as pitiless as any similarly equipped youth may find on starting into any trade or business on Manhattan Island. In fact, nothing in the "help advertisements " of our local newspapers for any kind of trained high-grade service quite parallels the offers of cheap work con- stantly made in our Law Journal by members of the bar bred at college and law school. Members of our bar who have recently published books have in- formed the writer that there is no difficulty whatever in procuring men of well trained intellect to do the drudgery incident to such publications very cheaply, and that while the sober, steadfast, and demure of these stand by such work for beggarly pay, others of cheaper faculty and schooling make a break for independent busi- ness, and in some way get ahead. The chasm between the tyro and the successful lawyer is enor- mous ; it is made so, not so much by the legitimate differences of age, experience, learning, and ability, as by the older man's mate- rial accidents, largely capable of being expressed in dollars, — that is, well equipped and extensive offices at an annual rental of two to four dollars per square foot of floor surface, membership in prominent expensive clubs with long waiting lists, and similar advantages. This showing persuades persons of a certain not rare quality of mind that to succeed at the bar it is needful to be spectacular. Young men of this species hire offices beyond their means, talk loudly in elevators and public places of representing influential clients and vast interests wholly imaginary; they announce their lack of time to take lunch, and if their antecedents are not too easily traceable such young men come before this community with engraved announcements that they are about " to resume " prac- tice at the metropolitan bar. It may be that law makes one fussy, for Chaucer says his man of law was the busiest of men, and yet "seemed busier than he was." Older men of this stripe make the local competition more fac- titious than ever, not only by grasping business and having ob- tained it by working out of it a fee from every point of view, but by utterly absorbing all the credit for work and professional skill, though such credit belongs to others kept in the shade. The writer has heard a man of this sort, a highly successful money-