policies, had "lawyer" stamped all over them. He seems to have said: "My client is the British people; my opponent's client is Vested Interest in land and property and capital. I will defeat my opponent." And he did. But events have shown that the judgment he obtained was not a sound one; it was not creative in the sense of dealing with the needs of the country as a whole; it was penal, causing loss, injustice, and even real suffering where his generous disposition never intended such things to happen. Mr George, indeed, is essentially not a lawyer. His disregard for precedent was always a source of concern to his friends in the Cabinet.

Now the scope for genuine originality, for great and moving conceptions respecting the government of a vast community, is as wide in matters of State as it is in literature, science, and art; but the last man in the world who ought to be allowed to attempt it is the lawyer, be he distinguished or not. The reasons are two: (a) that the legal mind has too strong a tendency towards guidance by precedent; and (b) that it is accustomed to a form of mental procedure which is ethically injurious. No professional men are so lacking in originality as the men of the Law.

VI

(a) The search for a precedent is fatal to originality. If some new shipping laws are needed the lawyer has no tendency to study modern shipping itself: he looks back into the past, revises his knowledge of the Hanseatic League, consults the first shipping Acts, compares and contrasts them with the present Acts, with foreign Acts-indeed he does a lot of hard work, but most of it in the wrong direction. Schemes that have worked well in years gone by certainly deserve respect : the men who formed them were no doubt ahead of their time. But is not that a strong reason why modern legislators should formulate laws that spring out of the needs expressed rather than out of a study of the past? Our present law-making is hide-bound by history, and it always will be until a new spirit and a new and unfettered type of

intellect is brought into action. Probably that is too much to hope for.

The parliamentary pushfulness of the modern lawyer and barrister is due to several factors: like other men of ambition, they love the limelight, and they take pride in all forms of power; but the main factor, behind every other, is thisthat politics is the best method of advertising. Ordinary trade publicity is odious and could not be tolerated; and yet publicity is needed. The House gives it, plus a useful salary. Consequently we have a plenitude of the wrong kind of minds at the headquarters of Government: men whose training is in most cases the reverse of the kind we want. The originalities of the Commons have nearly always come from laymen. If such men had had to deal with the initiative and control of parliamentary business, would they have taken nearly a quarter of a century to settle Home Rule?

VII

(b) The second point may be illustrated by quoting a portion of Lord Brougham's speech at the trial of Queen Caroline. He said:

"An advocate, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows in the discharge of that offer but one person in the world-that client-and none other. To save the client by all expedient means, to protect that client at all hazards and cost to all others, and among others to himself, is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties: and he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction which he may bring upon any other. Nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, and casting them if need be to the winds, he must go on reckless of the consequences if his fate should unhappily be to involve his country in confusion for his client's protection."

This is a point of view that has strong analogies with Treitschke's theory of what the individual owes to the

State, or of Bethmann-Hollweg's "necessity knows no law."

The truth is, a lawyer's honesty may be merely professional. In cases where he is absolutely convinced that his client has a just case, the honesty is as real as any other man's honesty; but in other circumstances a lawyer may become so easily sincere no one has raised self-suggestion in business to so fine an art as he has raised it, and in politics he can persuade himself that any policy he espouses is right: his mind has been made that way by the training he has had. He is the modern sophist, and quite unsuited to dealing with the practical needs of a vast population, with the mysteries of foreign trade, or with the construction of a battle fleet. These matters call for expert knowledge and sympathetic insight. We who have seen the lawyer-politician crossexamine an innocent and truthful but nervous witness, flaying him alive, and then holding him up to ridicule, have left the court with a feeling of disgust for the iniquities of an out-of-date court procedure, and with a feeling of contempt for the barrister who can draw fat fees for prostituting his conscience in the service of his client.

VIII

Readers of Lord Alverstone's Recollections will recall an instance less brutal but typical of what we mean. Anthony Trollope, the novelist, had to give evidence in a Post Office prosecution he was a Post Office official himself. Counsel for the Defence rose to cross-examine him. Asked for the title of his last book, Trollope gave it, and Counsel then inquired: "Is there a word of truth in it from beginning to end?" Trollope's answer, of course, was that the book was a work of fiction. "Fiction or no fiction, is there a word of truth in it?" demanded Counsel. "Well, if you put it that way, there is not," replied Trollope. Will it be believed that Counsel, in addressing the jury, asked them to acquit the prisoners on the ground that Mr Anthony Trollope, the principal witness against them, had admitted writing a book in which there was not a word of truth from the beginning to

the end? No educated man, not a lawyer or barrister, would ever stoop, in a public address, to such low sophistry as that. The Bar has often aired its moral indignation in court when some over-ambitious man of business has brought himself within the law, but what of the morality of the Bar itself? When Counsel inveighs against "this wicked person who, with a lack of scruple that is as cynical in its spirit as it is criminal in its results, robbed his employers of a five-pound note "—is the prisoner so sinful and the barrister so sinless? Is the Bar never cynical and never unscrupulous? That it is better than the Bar of other countries we cheerfully admit, but it ought to be ashamed of its legal dodges, its trumperies, its half truths, its dissimulations and its professional insincerities.

In America the conditions of business and government give the lawyer-politician a strong position, for Americans have not the same faith in government on business lines as we have; the phrase means something different to them. A Cabinet of business men would be regarded as "out for business": whereas a lawyer would be more likely to uphold the interests of the people-the lawyer class has "the wider vision and the smallest equation of personal interest obtainable anywhere." 1 Hence an ambitious American uses law as a means to an end; it is in itself a secondary matter, and he is never subdued by it, never allows it to dominate personality or to become a habit of thought.

IX

The intellectual idiosyncrasies of the Civil Service call for some remark in this connection. In most democratic countries the work of government, partly in regard to its policy and almost wholly as to its administration, is performed by the permanent staff. Speaking broadly, this work is well done, although it costs a great deal more than the same amount of work carried out in business concerns, where discipline is known and where errors of a serious nature mean

1 Article in Westminster Gazette on 14 Lawyer Politicians," by J. D. Whelpley.

instant dismissal. The call for originality is met by the permanent heads of Government Departments, and as they have been trained in Service traditions, they are not likely to meet that call with anything like freedom. Too often they, like other professional men, lean on precedent, and this is one argument for the bringing in of a Secretary of State who is not hide-bound by tradition, but looks at the matter of legislation from a wider and national standpoint. Cabinet changes are our only hope of originality in politics both as to its projects and its methods of materialising them. If we were left to the office men we should be in a poor plight. The office mind dealing with native questions in distant colonies has often been woefully inept; dealing with such important items as the delimitation of the Canada-Alaska frontier it has been a tragedy. And nothing could have been more humiliating than some of the weaknesses and illiteracies of the London War Censorship, 1914-1916, especially in its earlier days, and in some of its later developments. Things were done which were absurd to the very limit. The wrong men were used-the "system" again—but even if the right men had been put in command, they would have been right only in the sense that they had a good Service record. What was wanted was a mind that could face a new situation with confidence and grip, and very few Service men have had a training that would enable them to perform such a task. Consequently fixedness of thought and action is the staple element of the Civil Service mind.

But, it will be asked, in what sense can you have originality in a Government Department? You cannot change Whitehall from a democratic to an autocratic régime. What possible room is there for newness in taxation when the only difference in, say, the income tax is made by addition or subtraction? Yes; the old questions and the old spirit. A clean sweep of the chief Service men, replaced by men of commercial efficiency who would "fire" subordinates for serious errors, would save the country millions a year. Is not that an originality worth thinking about? Even in offices where professional men are engaged-lawyers, engineers, and so on-there is the same room for speeding up and for