THE BARS OF UNITED STATES AND ENGLAND complete change in the structure of every stratum of English society. In the United States, on the other hand, from the very commencement there has been a fusion of the functions of the two branches of the profession, however much for pur poses of practical convenience there may be an actual division by individual agree ment into two spheres of labour. Perhaps the extent of this fusion can best be seen from the oath of office imposed in the State of Michigan, which conjoins together " the duties ' of the office of attorney and counselor-at-law and solicitor and counselor in chancery." It is obvious that conditions of wide geography, sparse populations, state divisions, busy progress, the converging of different races, were foreign to specialisa tion, to traditional exclusions, to barriers on professional activity and usefulness, to stately methods and to old-world habits, and there was consequently an obligation towards the union of many functions. It was found in the United States in the course of its rapid and tremendous expansion that there was no advantage in recourse to ancient divisions and no advantage in the evolution of a distinct class of advocates invested with attributes of privilege. Noticeable in mere externality is the obli gation in England, the absence in the United States, of rigid forensic costume. Absent in England, at any rate for centuries, present in the United States, is the imposition upon the advocate of that splendid exposition of forensic duty, the oath, which can be best realized by a consideration of the terms of that enjoined in the State of Washington. I do not instance the latter as an innovation in the sense of being without historic prece dent, because not only are the terms of that majestic declaration drawn from the provi sions of the oath for advocates prescribed by the laws of the Swiss Canton of Geneva, but each of its provisions finds its historical parallel in the ordinances imposed by the early kings of France upon the noble order of advocates of the Bar of Paris. I only
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mention it by way of comparison with the Bar of England, where with the single excep tion of the sergeants-at-law, who were a very special class of advocates, the obligation of an oath was never enjoined on the barrister although it was always insistent upon the attorney branch of the profession. Again the contractual relationship existing in England between the attorney and his client has formed the basis of the system in the United States, while in England that relationship has always been alien to the legal conception of an advocate. The rela tionship in the United States being a con tractual one there is the consequent placing of remuneration on a contractual, although I do not say a commercial basis. There is in the United States the collateral obligation of responsibility for negligence in the carry ing out of instructions. For all these rea sons it is obvious that in the United States not only has there been one type of the pro fessional lawyer instead of two, but that that type has been from the English point of view the attorney, and not the advocate. There is in England a large, and I think, an increasing opinion in the direction of breaking down the division between the two branches of the profession, and it is indeed to be hoped that if that project be brought about there may contemporaneously be brought and set before us in England for universal adoption a comprehensive code of ethics, such as that to be placed before the next Congress of the American Bar Association. That leads me to remark upon another aspect of the development of the profession in the United States, which can never be arrived at in England. From the begin ning there has been in the United States, not one Bar, but numerous State Bars, each one having not only state recognition, but also more or less internal control from the body of legal opinion resident in the particular state. The evolution of the American Bar Association with projects of scrutiny and standardization seems to prom
