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The Green Bag
dies the opinion of the Court, which may be found in Plowden's Reports:— If the man go to this water and drown himself it is, will he nill he, goes, mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life. In the same scene, when the gravedigger tosses up a skull, Hamlet, with biting sarcasm, says:— Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in his time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fine and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dust? And then he asks Horatio the question: Is not parchment made of sheepskins? To which Hamlet replies:— Aye, my lord, and of calfskins.
But it is the dramatists and the novelists who have given the severest caricatures of the profession. With few exceptions the lawyer of the stage is either a knave or a mountebank. The wide realm of fiction can be searched almost in vain for lawyers who can prove a good moral character. Instead we have a very rogues' gallery. In modern political discussions fre quent reference has been made by re sponsible leaders of thought to the supposed low tone of the bar. On more than one occasion President Roose velt, that castigator censorque minorum, has referred slightingly to "law honesty," and in his annual message to Congress of 1905, he referred to the great need of—A higher sense of ethical conduct, especially among business men and in the great pro fession of law. His political rival, Mr. Bryan, was even more emphatic in a recent address. He hoped that the day would come—
And the princely misanthrope replies:— They are sheep and calves which seek assur ance in that.
When we will not have so many man who will sell their souls to make grand larceny possible. Perhaps some time it will be less disgraceful for a lawyer to assist in gigantic robbery than for a highwayman to go out and hold up the wayfarer.
Shakspere forgot to say, however, that many of these technicalities and fictions were the method by which the lawyers emancipated society from the brutal rigor of the feudal system, and the fact is that almost the only auto graphs we have of the great poet are those attached to these same sheepskin parchments for the better "assurance" of Shakspere's title to his lands, and about the only business transactions in which he engaged, of which we know, were lawsuits in which he benefited by the services of counsel. It is with lawyers as with doctors, men criticise them in health, but run to them in time of need.
He gave but one illustration for this sweeping indictment of a noble profes sion, of which he himself is a member, and that illustration was founded upon a gross misapprehension of the true facts. A prejudice which has persisted for so many generations and which is so deeply rooted in popular feeling must have its original basis in some primitive trait of human nature. I find it in the ele mental jealousy which the muscle has always felt toward the brain. For ex ample Harry Hotspur's remark, which I have quoted, is the sneer of a hotblooded warrior for the man of thought. In primitive times physical prowess was
