On The Dislike Of Lawyers

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Title:     On The Dislike Of Lawyers
Author: A. G. Gardiner [More Titles by Gardiner]

"I have spent a large part of my life in advising business men how to get out of their difficulties," said Mr. Asquith the other day. It was a statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the cackle about a "business Government" and the pestilence of lawyers.

I am not a lawyer, and have no particular affection for lawyers. I keep out of their professional reach as much as possible. But it is as foolish to ban them as a class as it would be to assume that a grocer or a tailor is a great statesman because he is a successful grocer or tailor. Running an empire is quite a different job from running a grocery establishment, and it is folly to suppose that because a man has been successful in buying and selling bacon and butter for his own profit he can ipso facto govern a nation with wisdom and prudence. Who are the most distinguished grocers of to-day? They are Lord Devonport and Sir Thomas Lipton. Both excellent men, I've no doubt. But would you like to hand over the Premiership to either of them? Now, would you?

The great statesman has to prove himself a great statesman just as the great grocer has to prove himself a great grocer. He has to prove it by the qualities of statesmanship exercised in the full glare of publicity. If the grocer makes a howler in his trade the world knows nothing about it. If the statesman makes a howler all the world knows about it. He has to emerge to the front in the most public of all battles, and you may be sure that no one comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of the fiercest trials. He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer. Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to survive it. No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, "Yah! nailmaker," or to Mr. Balfour, "Yah! landlord," thinking he had disposed of them. Why should you suppose that when you have said "Yah! lawyer" to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd George you have disposed of them?

Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people--brewers, or soap boilers, or bankers? I doubt it. They are just the average, and include good and bad like any other class. Judge Jeffreys was a monster; but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who largely saved the liberties of this country. I doubt whether the world has ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln. And he was a lawyer. I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made. He had a practice at the Bar which, I believe, brought him in L10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought him more than L5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable seat on the Woolsack and L10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman. Ah, you say, but look at the glory. Well, look at it. I would, as Danton said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of men. It is the most ungrateful calling on earth. And, whatever other defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing as glory is not one of them. You will discover more passion for glory in Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five years. And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.

But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis. It is an old dislike. You remember that remark of Johnson's when he was asked on a certain occasion who was the man who had left the room: "I don't like saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; but I believe he is an attorney." And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a barrister as "a loaded blunderbuss "--if you bought him he blew your opponent's brains out; if your opponent bought him he blew yours out. His weapon is the law, but his object is not justice. As often as not he aims at defeating justice, and the more skilful a lawyer he is the more injustice he succeeds in doing. It is this detachment from the merits of a case, this deliberate repudiation of conscience in his business relations that makes him so suspect. Of course he has a very sound reply. "It is my business to put my client's case, and my opponent's business to put his client's case. And it is the business of the judge and jury to see that justice is done as between us." That is true, but it does not get rid of the suspicion that attaches to a man who fights for the guilty or the innocent with equal fervour.

And then he deals in such a tricky article. When Sancho Panza was Governor of the Island of Barataria he administered justice. If he had been the Governor of the Island of Britain he would have administered the law, and his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look askance at those who practice them. You may be the greatest rascal of your time, but if you study the law and keep within its letter the strong lance of justice cannot reach you. No, law which is the servant of justice often betrays his master.

But do not let us be unjust. If law to-day is more nearly the instrument of justice than it has ever been, it is the great lawyers to whom we chiefly owe the fact. There are Dodsons and Foggs in the law, but there are also Pyms and Pratts who have upheld the liberties of this country in the teeth of tyrant kings and servile Parliaments.

[The end]
A. G. Gardiner's essay: On The Dislike Of Lawyers

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