Lawyers are supposed to be more interested in the past than in the
future and to resent lay criticism. Yet most lawyers would find
the contemplation of existing anomalies intolerable if there were
no prospect of any future remedy, and so far as lay criticism is
concerned, it is almost invariably the lawyers who want reforms and
are hopelessly obstructed by stupidity and indolence in the House of
Commons. If the laity were really interested in legal reform the world
would be a happier place.
In the last twenty years I have come across a large number of judges,
barristers, and solicitors who have spent endless time and trouble
in trying to improve our marriage and divorce laws without receiving
any aid or gratitude from the public, and even an incomparable jurist
and versatile scholar like Sir Frederick Pollock has never spared any
effort to remove hardship with which he may not have been brought so
closely in contact as less learned men.
I mention all this because my motive in writing the following remarks
is to stimulate the interest of the laity in the law. The law offers
a fine intellectual discipline and moral training to its students.
Its standard of honesty is far higher than the ordinary commercial
standard and it teaches men and women how to think, as distinct from
cramming miscellaneous facts into their heads without any guiding
principle. Medieval men and women who had any education at all were far
better educated than the newspaper reader of to-day. They were often
bilingual and usually understood theology, if not law, and therefore
comprehended logic and the rules of reasoning far better than the
ordinary voter of our own time.
Professor Jowett once said that logic was “neither a science nor an art
but a dodge,” and that is rather the attitude of the man in the street
to law. I hope that any reader of this book who may be induced to look
into some of the points I have mentioned will feel this attitude to be
as Philistine and unworthy as Jowett’s other observation that “Ici on
parle français” was the real inscription over the gates of Hell.