We have all been so occupied with the war in Europe that few of us, I
suppose, have even heard of another war which has been raging in the law
courts for 150 days or so between two South African corporations over some
question of property. It seems to have been marked by a good deal of
frightfulness. In the closing scenes Mr. Hughes, one of the counsel,
complained that he had been called a fool, a liar, a scoundrel, and so on
by his opponent, and the judge lamented that the case had been the occasion
of so much barristerial bitterness.
But it was not the light which the case threw on the manners of counsel
that interested me. After all, these things are part of the game. They have
no more reality than the thumping blows which the Two Macs exchange in the
pantomime. I have no doubt that after their memorable encounter in the
Bardell _v_. Pickwick case, Serjeant Buzfuz and Serjeant Snubbin went out
arm-in-arm, and over their port in the Temple (where the wine is good and
astonishingly cheap) made excellent fun of the whole affair. The wise
juryman never takes any notice of the passion and tears, the heroics and
the indignation of counsel. He knows that they are assumed not to enlighten
but to darken his mind. I always recall in this connection the remark of a
famous lawyer who rose to great eminence by the exercise of his emotions.
He was standing by the graveside of a departed friend and observed that one
of the mourners, a fellow--lawyer, was shedding real tears. "What a waste
of raw material," he remarked in a whisper to his neighbour. "Those tears
would be worth a guinea a drop before a jury."
What interested me in the case was the statement that the legal costs had
been £150,000, and that Mr. Upjohn, K.C., alone had had a retainer of
£1000, and had been kept going with a "refresher" of £100 a day. I like
that word "refresher." It has a fine bibulous smack about it. Or perhaps it
is a reminiscence of "the ring." Buzfuz feels a bit pumped by the day's
round. He has perspired his £100, as it were, and is doubtful whether he
can come up to the scratch without a refresher. And so he is taken to his
corner by his client and dosed with another £100. Then all his ardour
returns. He sees the thing as clear as daylight--the radiant innocence of
the plaintiff, the black perfidy of the defendant. To-morrow evening the
vision will have faded again, but another £100 will make it as plain as
ever. Yes, it is a good word--"refresher"--a candid word, an honest word.
It puts the relation on a sound business footing. There is no sham
sentiment about it. Give me another refresher, says Buzfuz, and I'll shed
another pailful of tears for you, and blacken both the defendant's eyes for
him.
But as I read of these princely earnings I could not help thinking of what
an irrational world this is in the matter of rewards. Here are a couple of
lawyers hurling epithets and "cases" at each other at £100 a day. At the
end a verdict is given for this side or that, and outside the people
concerned no one is a penny the better or worse. And not many miles away
hundreds of thousands of men are living in the mud of rat-infested
trenches, with the sky raining destruction upon them, and death and
mutilation the hourly incident of their lives. They have no retaining fee
and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them
20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind
conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You
die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is
perspiring for his client at £100 a day.
This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of
drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the
eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and
never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that
Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns
£130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that
Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry
which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble
nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp
distributor to keep him in bread and butter.
Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme
off on you. And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves
of these things. It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy
talk about "equality of sacrifice," and so much easy forgetfulness of the
inequality of rewards. It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches
have no necessary relation to service. The genius for getting money is an
altogether different thing from the genius for service. I suppose the
Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland. And I
suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest. But who will dare apply the
money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity--the
one fabulously rich by brewing the "black stuff," as they call it in
Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a
thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the
full tide of his powers? Which means the more to the world? Perhaps one
effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these
things--will teach us to look behind the money and title to the motives
that get the money and the title. It is not the money and title we should
distrust so much as the false implications attaching to them.
And, after all, we exaggerate the importance of the material rewards. They
must often be very much of a bore. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, a
man doesn't sleep any better because he has a choice of forty bedrooms in
his house. He can only take one ride even though he has fifty motor-cars.
He cannot get more joy out of the sunshine than you or I can. The birds
sing and the buds swell for all of us, and in the great storehouse of
natural delights there is no money taken and no price on the goods. Mr.
Rockefeller's £100 a minute (if that is his income) is poor consolation for
his bad digestion, and the late Mr. Pierpoint Morgan would probably have
parted with half his millions to get rid of the excrescence that made his
nose an unsightly joke. We cannot count our riches at the bank--even on the
material side, much less on the spiritual. As I came along the village this
morning I saw Jim Squire digging up his potatoes in the golden September
light. I hailed him, and inquired how the crop was turning out. "A
wunnerful fine crop," he said, "and thank the Lord, there ain't a spot o'
disease in 'em." And as he straightened his back, pointed to the tubers
strewn about him, and beamed like the sun at his good fortune, he looked
the very picture of autumn's riches.