"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 £10,000 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 £5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable
seat on the Woolsack and £10,000 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.