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THE GREEN BAG
but a deplorable perversion of a calling — that is "the pride of the human intellect " — that for mere hire the lawyer should lend himself to the advocacy of any cause how ever meretricious, or the promotion or de fense of any scheme, however pregnant with danger to the state or to society. There is no disguising the fact that the tendency of "the learned professions" is too much in the direction of money-getting, re garding their calling rather as "get-rich" opportunities than for honorable achieve ment and positive good. There are men of "the clerical cloth" who, if they did not answer when some other man was called, yet never fail to recognize in it the voice of God when the trumpet-sound comes from a vineyard proclaiming an increased salary. They "make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments to be seen of men," forgetting that he who was the forerunner of the great Master, whom they profess to serve, clothed in camel's hair, his loins girded with leather, his meat of locusts and wild honey, trod the wasteplaces and the flinty by-ways with bleeding feet in fulfilling his sublime mission. There are physicians skilled in the arts of materia medica and surgery, so tenacious of what they term "professional etiquet" that they would not sacrifice it to save life in a hovel, from the ravages of gangrene or the agonies of appendicitis; yet who, without standing on the order of their going, will brave re proach and the howling tempest of a mid night storm to reach the gilded home of a millionaire suffering with a gum-boil or the gout; or leave a Belshazzar's feast or a prayer-meeting to answer the call from a hysterical heiress complaining of insomnia, in dread of dying of a rose " in aromatic pain." And now turning to you, doctors of law, who boast that "the sparks of all the sciences are raked up from the ashes of the law," are you paying devotion less to Mammon than at the shrine of Justice? Do you think more of the cause than the fee? Do vou
hold your profession as the merchant does his goods, for sale to any patron who has the money? Do you decline a case because you believe it to be dishonest, or does its ac ceptance depend upon the size of the fee? Do you question the integrity of the case presented and "turn it down," or do you suggest to the suspect how much and what evidence is necessary to win it, with the thought that he will supply it whether false or true? Do you promote strife or dis courage and discountenance vexatious liti gation notwithstanding the temptation of a large retainer? Do you hear the statement of facts, and then look up the law, and find ing the case bad so inform the client, or do you first look up the law and, with a sugges tive wink, tell him to get witnesses sufficient to enable you to get beyond the judge on the bench to the jury, who you believe from prejudice or ignorance may be cajoled into a favorable verdict? Do you retain in your service a hired pack of swift bicyclists to chase the ambulance conveying to the hos pital some unfortunate injured man from a railroad wreck, to get the suit for damages before the surgeon chloroforms him for an amputation? Do you send your standing expert doctors to attend the autopsy and then hunt up the survivors entitled under the statute to maintain an action for dam ages? Do you attend labor-union picnics, and with impassioned words harangue about "government by injunction," "the captains of industry," and the great octopus of capital and the aggressions of corporate power, and like old Cato, who with reiteration exclaimed, "Carthagena delenda est," proclaim eternal war between labor and capital; and then de scending from the platform distribute your professional cards inscribed " Damage Suits a Specialty"? And when you get beyond the court to the jury, draw a pathetic pic ture of the squalid home of the one-legged or one-armed victim of an accident, with wife of the scanty dress, sallow cheek, and sunken eye, with skeleton baby pressed to
