The Country Lawyer, 1832, the intricacies of English electoral law are bewilderingly numerous. Some of them are exceedingly peculiar. Days are occasionally spent in arguing and settling a disputed point, and every year numerous appeals are carried to the High Court in London. When a political party is in funds, it employs a lawyer to help it through the registration courts; when money is not so plentiful, the work is undertaken by a lay man who has made himself an expert in electoral law. The registration court is the only one in England in which a lawyer may find himself confronted by a paid advocate who has neither been called to the Bar at one of the Inns of Court, nor passed the Solicitors' Examination of the Incorporated Law Society. Another piece of work, profitable to the lawyer, is that of agent to a Parliamentary candidate. Laymert can and do undertake the duties of agent to a candidate at a Parliamentary election; but a candidate who desires to steer clear of the pitfalls of the far-reaching bribery law of 1883 and of the political libel law of 1895 usually appoints a lawyer to act for him. It is much cheaper to pay a lawyer's fee than to run the risk of the ruinous expense of a petition from the unsuccessful candidate on the ground of
369
some technical contravention of the election laws. Every time Parliament interferes with the election laws, it digs new pitfalls for unwary candidates; and, as years go on, lawyers are necessarily getting a larger and a firmer hold on the business of the Parlia mentary agent. No account has been taken in this sketch of the clerkships to semi-public bodies, such as charity boards, and trustees to educa tional institutions, which fall to the lot of the country lawyer; but sufficient has been written to show the prominent position which the lawyer occupies in the public life of provincial England. Socially, too, his position is a good one. In these old Eng lish towns social lines are drawn with much rigidity. The lawyer, however, is usually on the right side of the line. He has his recognized place in county society, and he and his wife and daughters are on the lists for county balls and other exclu sive assemblies at which the merchant or the manufacturer seldom by any chance appears. He ranks with the clergyman, and with the army officer, and as a member of a learned profession has the entree to places to which mere wealth, no matter how great, would never afford a passport.
