so great an admiration for arbitration; it is because an enterprise conducted without bribery is inconceivable to them. Many of our politicians are lawyers, and clients who confide their cases to them attach great weight to their Parliamentary influence. It is for this reason that a former Minister of Justice is always sure of getting remunerative law-suits even when he is not very talented, because he has means of influencing the magistrates, with whose failings he is very familiar, and whom he could ruin if he wished. The great political advocates are sought out by financiers who have serious difficulties to overcome in the law courts, who are accustomed to bribe on a large scale and in consequence pay royally. The world of employers thus appears to our rulers as a world of adventurers, gamblers, and parasites of the stock exchange; they consider that this rich and criminal class must expect to submit from time to time to the demands of other social groups. Their conception of the ideal capitalist society would be a compromise between conflicting appetites under the auspices of political lawyers.[1]
The Catholics would not be sorry, now they are in
- ↑ I borrow from a celebrated novel by Léon Daudet a description of the character of the barrister Méderbe. "The latter was a curious character, tall, thin, of a well-set-up figure, surmounted by a head like a dead fish, green impenetrable eyes, oiled and flattened hair, his whole appearance being frozen and rigid. … He had chosen the profession of a barrister as being one which would supply his own and his wife's need of money. … He took part chiefly in financial cases, on account of the large profit to be made out of them, and of the secrets he learned from them; he was employed in such cases on account of his semi-political, semi-judicial relations, which always secured him victory in any case he pleaded. He charged fabulous fees. What he was paid for was certain acquittal. This man then had enormous power… He gave one the impression of a bandit armed for social life and sure of impunity. …" (Les Morticoles, pp. 287–288). It is clear that many of these traits are copied from those of the man the Socialists so often called the Eiffel barrister, before they made him the demi-god of Republican Defence. [In the Panama affair, Eiffel was prosecuted for having illegally appropriated a large sum. Waldeck-Rousseau defended him in the law courts.—Trans.]
