The Relative Influence of the Lawyer in Modern Life technicalities and fictions. Next to Shakspere, the average man of our race gets his first and strongest impres sions of human nature from Charles Dickens. Although Dickens served his apprenticeship in the Middle Temple, and was himself, for a time, a law yer's clerk, he had an intense hatred of the profession. This was partly due to the fact that he saw more of its shady side in the criminal courts than of its better side, but it is also due to the fact that his personal experiences in some litigation with some literary pirates, who had published imitations of the "Christmas Carol" and "Martin Chuzzlewit," were so unfortunate that when his books were again pirated he wrote to his counsel :— It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong, the law. I shall not easily forget the ex pense and anxiety and horrible injustice of the "Carol" case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I was the robber instead of the robbed. According to Dickens, in "Bleak House":— The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly and con sistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand prin ciple is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble. Bitter satire, and like most satire a gross exaggeration! On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott, himself a lawyer of experience and no mean judge of human nature, puts in the mouth of the Antiquary this truer estimate of a lawyer:— In a profession where unbounded trust is necessarily imposed, there is nothing sur prising that fools should neglect it in their
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stupidity, and tricksters abuse it in their knavery. But it is more to the honor of those, and I will vouch for many, who unite integrity with skill and attention and walk honorably upright where there are so many pitfalls and stumbling blocks for those of a different character. To such men their fellow citizens may safely entrust the care of pro tecting their patrimonial rights, and their country the more sacred charge of her laws and privileges.* Without further defending the legal profession against the assaults of the novelist and the dramatist, let me simply say after being at the bar for nearly a quarter of a century, and after mingling not only with lawyers, but with differ ent classes of men in various parts of this country, that in my judgment no class of men has any higher sense of honor than the legal profession. As a profession it has a threefold character and purpose. It is primarily a trade, in the sense that men pursue it to obtain in exchange for the product of their brains a pecuniary reward. To this extent, it is commercial in the sense that all trades are commercial. It is, secondly, a profession, in that it occu pies a special field of knowledge for which no one is capable who will not give the special study of a lifetime to it. Brougham once said that a "lawyer must know everything about something and something about everything." But law is not merely a commercial trade or an intellectual profession; it is above all a vocation, and, measured by its beneficent results, of a very high and noble character. While law has its utili tarian and economic side, it has also its moral side, as it is for most purposes the final conception of society as to what is just between man and man. One further and most potent reason for the unpopularity of the lawyer re* For these references to Dickens and Scott in their relations to law and lawyers, I feel I should express my obligation to two very interesting pamphlets on the subject written by John Marshall Gest of the Philadelphia bar—J. M. B.
