THE LAW AND LAWYERS
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THE LAW AND LAWYERS BY HON. JOHN F. PHILIPS EVERY student of history is impressed with the fact that the history of half the world is that of nomadic barbarism where "No common weal the human tribe allied, Bound by no law, by no fixed morals tied, Each snatched the booty which his fortune brought, And wise in instinct, each his welfare sought." In the wanderings of thousands of years, like locusts, the hordes came, swarming, flying, singing, and dying; and again they came only to swarm, to sing, and to die. No where did they dedicate a single mountain fastness to the freedom of individual man, or build one temple to justice. While in the other half, though begirt with the splen dors of civilization, from Genesis to the Ser mon on the Mount it was little more than the meretricious display of crowned heads, absolutism in government, and fetich ecclesiasticism. Man was little more in the panorama than the herds which Abraham divided into flocks and Aristotle classified. He sacrificed continually upon the altar of the kingdom and the empire. His flocks, his estates, and his person were at the ca price and behest of the potentate, of the anointed king and priest. In the concrete government stood for force, where, of sup posed necessity, the ruler — the state —• was of more consequence than the con stituent. It was a process of evolution, filtrating through centuries of cruel prerogative, the grossness of superstition, and the selfishness of power, by which the races learned that government without oppression was insepar able from the sense of justice to the indi vidual subject, and that the state was mag nified just in proportion as the citizen grew in consequence.
It was reserved for the classic age to give birth to the office of the advocate for the litigant; and it was reserved to our sturdy, rugged Anglo-Saxon ancestry, upon the meadows of Runnymede, to write into the very bonework of our political organism that the state must maintain the rule of justice that hears before it condemns, that proceeds upon inquiry, and renders judg ment only after trial. The world is given to the idea that the lawyer is the mere product of this civiliza tion, the foam on the billows of its ocean. The truth of this history, however, is that no profession among men has been such an im portant factor in the vindication of human rights and the advancement of universal justice between the state and the subject, and between man and man, as the real lawyer. And just so long as the profession recalls and holds in sentimental devotion its ancient traditions, will it maintain its primacy in honorable achievement and pop ular respect, and no longer. With all his advancements in learning, astuteness and craftiness, the advocate has never surpassed in nobility the conception the ancient Greek and Roman had of his office, that without price or retainer he should see to it that the strong should not despoil the weak, or the wrong triumph over the right; which conception, theoreti cally at least, has been sought to be perpetu ated in English and American jurispru dence by regarding him as an adjunct to the courts in the administration of justice. The underlying thought in all this was not based more on the idealism of the pre ferment of his envied office than the sense that his transcendent abilities and powers of speech might not become a mere article of purchase, to thwart the ends of public justice, and become a menace to social order. It is not only a hurtful misconception,
