Our ban on lawyers has, likewise, not attained much success. Few
lawyers, whose sacrifice of their practice has added strength to the
Congress cause, have responded to the call. The prestige of British
court in _civil_ Suits between an _Indian and Indian_ has not been
destroyed and can not be so easily destroyed; for, ordinarily this
variety of legal contests is not much colored with injustice, as
political trials are. If lawyers had been called out, because, being a
trained class of workers, the country wanted their undivided time and
attention at this critical hour, it would have been a different matter,
and, perhaps, if the call had been so made many, many more would have
responded to it. But it was put the wrong way, and the lawyer was made
to appear as if, in pursuing his profession, he was acting sinfully and
must atone for it by a complete withdrawal from practice. The result was
that, out of sheer self-respect, many really good lawyers have declined
to respond to the call. Many could not give up their practice for
pecuniary reasons and were too honest to adopt subterfuges calculated to
create a semblance of sacrifice. Lawyers have become "pariahs" of our
present political life. Some of them had borne the brunt of public
agitation for more than two decades; their place is vacant and no class
of workers of equal intelligence and keenness has come forward to take
it.