The Lawyer s Position in Society. the fee system, as it usually exists, is a curse to the community, masking licensed robbery; that the periodical election of judges is a debasement of the ermine and opens the door to judicial corruption. But I should be grievously misunderstood if you should interpret me as implying that the profession is wholly, or even in any considerable degree to blame for the con tempt in which it has come to be held by the half-educated masses. The inveterate prejudices of ignorance, the appeals of demagogues to people suffering from real or imaginary wrongs, are sufficient to explain to a large degree that extraordinary state of mind which can only be likened to a delu sion. Many people do not recognize the place the lawyer holds in the community. They see in him not one who renders justice pos sible, but one who makes it difficult and cost ly; not one whose work is to promote the welfare of the commonwealth, but one who fattens upon the wrongs which he has to a large extent created. But the lawyer's place in the community is real and necessary. The assertion made by some, that he is the survival of offensive measures, is radically false. His position is necessary to the life of every form of modern civilization, it is the direct result of that enor mous development through which society has passed. We may not care to apply to him that awful account which Mr. Herbert Spen cer gives of the world's evolutionary process (at hearing which the universe is reported to have "shuddered). Still the differentiations in society which produced the heterogeneity of professions brought forth the lawyer. In primitive ages, the conditions of life were simple and the adjustment of the rela tions existing between men was an easy matter. With growing complexity in the social structure, and the more subtle distinc tions between right and wrong, there arose insensibly a class of men learned in such matters.
247
When men discovered so much about human physiology and therapeutics that such knowledge could no longer be common property, there arose a profession devoted to that branch of science, and the physician is in the first instance the man learned in the healing art; and so I conceive the lawyer as a man who primarily devoted himself to the exposition of law. He is a man learned in the law. The lawyer is, however, more than a student of laws. The labors of the philoso pher investigating the principles upon which the law is based, the notions of personality, liberty, moral responsibility, property, the family and the state, or the research of the ethnologist and anthropologist tracing the primitive customs having the force of laws as they vary among different races and in different ages, are but the foundations upon which the lawyer bases his special work. A lawyer being in the first instance a man learned in the law of the land, he has duties ofvast responsibility and the widest influence; and the public is entitled to, and receives, the most ample protection against an abuse of the great powers of the office, which, by its agents, it has conferred upon the attorney. His moral character is carefully scrutinized, his whole career is watched, for his position as a member of the Bar, his success in his profession, is dependent .upon the rectitude of his conduct. Upon admittance to the Bar the lawyer pledges himself to aid in the ad ministration of justice, and he becomes an officer of the court. In all these solemn obligations, there appears no little resem blance to the course which is pursued in a sister profession, one with which for centuries the law was identified. I refer to theology and the preparation through which students in that science must pass before they are permitted to exercise the functions of the sacred ministry. Theological and legal students fit themselves by several years of study; both are tried and examined by those already in authority; both assume solemn obligations, over both a rigid law of moral
