By pleading usury or limitation, Save by a lawyer's pen and penetration? Who ever skulked behind the law's delay, Unless some shrewd attorney showed the way, By his superior skill got the ascendant, And let astray the innocent defendant?' 'Twas touching, quite, his horror when he saw, An honest Lawyer was a Legal Fiction! In Kathrina, Holland represents himself as meeting in New York many of his college friends: -"Here was one Who stole my wood in college and received With grace the kick I gave him. He had grown To be the tail of a portentous firm Of city lawyers, managed, as he said, The matter of collections, and had made In his small way, to use his modest phrase, In his last poem, "The Ring and the Book," Browning has chosen for his plot an old Italian criminal trial. This gives abundant The opportunities to ridicule the law, which are not neglected. logomachy of the pleaders is thus presented: "Hear my new reasons," interposed the first, That was a fire-brand at each fox's tail Unleashed in a cornfield: soon spread flare enough, As hurtled thither and there heaped themselves From earth's four corners, all authority And precedent. * And always once again the case postponed." Among the "British public," whom the poet continually addresses as "ye who like me not," the lawyers are likely to remain, since their calling is thus sneered at: "Law, the recognized machine, Elaborate display of pipe and wheel, Framed to unchoak, pump up and pour apace Of the last pleader in the case, we have this description: "Pompilius patron by the chance of the hour, To-morrow her persecutor-composite he, As becomes one who must meet such various calls O'er good and evil, smoothens both to one." After the "dolts and fools who make up reasonless unreasoning Rome" had been for a long time divided-half and half-in opinion concerning the murder: "Now for the trial," they roar: "the trial to test The truth, weigh husband and weigh wife alike I' the scales of the law, make one scale kick the beam!" Whereupon the poet tells "the simpletons" that "law is competent to no such feat." The orations of Hyacinthus de Archangelis (for Count Guido) and of Johannes-Baptista Bottinius are ludicrously interlarded with Latin-"Cicero-ized." The latter confesses to no higher motive in his prosecution of the unnatural murder than, "Still, it pays." The "Comic Blackstone," by Gilbert Abbott A. Beckett, embodies not a few of the charges already quoted. The author agrees with the learned Sir William in his opinion that every gentleman should know a little of the law; adding, "and, perhaps, say we, the less the better." The jurisdiction of Chancery over lunaties is explained upon the ground that it drives people mad. And the undue respect paid to the letter of the law is satirized in the report of the execution of a physician who humanely bled a patient in the streets and thus became obnoxious to the penal statute against shedding blood upon the highway. But if one would see all the accusations quoted against the profession multiplied and intensified-if he would see the law represented as "the sum of all villainies"-let him turn to the "Pleader's Guide." The lectures therein delivered to Mr. Job Surrebutter, counsel the commission of every offence known to the moral law. The young aspirant for legal spoils is advised: "To puzzle e'en by explanation, to appropriate money collected for his clients, to confound witnesses, to wrangle with his adversary, to abuse the opposite party, to bootlick the attorneys, etc. Two pictures in a word illustrate the policy inculcated. In the first, the plaintiff has hold upon the horns of the cow, whose ownership is disputed, the defendant upon the tail, while the lawyer is busy milking: in the second, we see him driving the animal from the scene, the rival claimants being too much engrossed in a fisticuff encounter to notice the disappearance of the prize. "Why, do you be sure we do: No?" said the "Why, when over night by It is safe to assert that there is no subject about which more jests are current than the law. "Lawyer's houses are built on fool's heads" runs the proverb. One day a simple farmer, who had just buried a rich relation, an attorney, was complaining of the great expense of a funeral cavalcade in the country. bury your attorneys here?" asked Foote. "Yes, to how else?" "Oh, we never do that in London;" other, much surprised, "how do you manage, then?" the patient happens to die, we lay him out in a room himself, lock the door, throw open the window, and in the morning he is gone." "Indeed!" exclaimed the farmer, with amazement, "what becomes of him?" "Why, that we can not exactly tell; all we know is, there's a strong smell of brimstone in the room the next morning." A gentleman once accosted Baron O'Grady, and asked him if he had heard of his son's robbery. "What!" said the baron, "Your son who is a lawyer? Pray, whom did he rob?" A gentleman leaving the company, somebody who sat next to Dr. Johnson asked who he was. "I can not exactly tell you, sir," replied the doctor, "and I should be loth to speak ill of any person whom I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney." Among the barbarous and ignorant, the prejudice against lawyers has always been bitter. Gibbon informs us that in the invasion of Rome, a vandal who cut out a lawyer's tongue remarked with serene complacency that he had stopped one viper from hissing. In his history of Peru, Prescott narrates that when a colony of Spaniards was forming for the occupation of that country, one of the first regulations passed was that no lawyer should be among the number. Shakspeare represents the insurgents in the rebellions of Tyler and Jack Cade as being specially rancorous against the lawyers. So violent was the hatred of them during the commonwealth, that not one was appointed on the committees for reforming the law. Turkey the punishment of lawyers is unique-they are pounded to death in a mortar. In Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, Olearius, the jurisconsult, congratulates himself on his escape from the mob at Frankfort. In the judicial history of our new territories, we find frequent enactments against the legal fraternity. "Lower Union District, Revision of March, 1861, Resolved, that no lawyer In shall be permitted to practice law in any court in this district, under penalty of not more than fifty nor less than twenty lashes and be banished from the district." "Trail Creek District, Aug. 20th, 1860. No lawyer, attorney, counsellor, or pettifogger, shall be allowed to plead in any case or before any judge or jury in this district." The idea that the presence of lawyers is incompatible with an ideal state of society, seems to have been entertained by Sir Thomas More. They were rigidly excluded from Utopia. The same idea finds a voice in the following advertisement copied by Mark Lemon into his inimitable Jest Book. "For sale, A large landed estate in Hertfordshire, with beautiful park, etc. N. B. There is not an attorney within fifteen miles of the neighberhood." To this description, the "late lamented" of Punch has significantly given the title of Arcadia. In the quotation of abuse directed against the law, our only difficulty has been to select from the materials at hand. We did not propose to reply to these foolish accusations. Some of them are designed as burlesque and nothing more; many of them are referable, of course, to ignorance. Indeed, the laity have always committed the grossest mistakes in their representations of the bar. Miss Edgeworth, for instance, makes one of her heroes, a young lawyer, achieve his reputation by bringing forward a point which was decisive of the case and which the senior counsel in his speech had entirely overlooked, an incident that could not possibly happen, as the junior never has the conclusion. The same reckless disregard of reality has ever characterized the treatment which the bar has received from the uninitiated. Their charges, then, do not deserve the compliment of refutation. Indeed, the world has furnished a practical refutation of them by giving to the profession its highest interests in trust. Another practical refutation is the success at the bar of such a man as Sir Samuel Romilly, whom Thomas Erskine May, in his Constitutional History of England, an historian as cautious as his predecessor Hallam, styles "the best and purest of public men." We shall, in conclusion, cite Mr. Butler's explanation of the sharp contradiction between the prejudices so freely uttered against the bar and the real trust reposed in its essential integrity, good faith and fair dealing: "There are bad men in every calling, and more of them, probably, in the law than in the other learned professions, because of its ampler opportunities and readier means for misdoing; and, accord ing to the custom of men, the worse specimens are those most generally accepted as types of the class, as if, by a perversion of a familiar rule, an implied warranty existed that the whole profession · correspond with the damaged sample. But, besides this usage, which applies equally to every other profession, and enables those who will, to visit on all physicians the reproach of the mal-practice of a few, and on all clergymen the scandals and follies of some, and on all Christian men and women the inconsistencies and faults of their fellows, there is another reason why our profession, which is the vehicle and engine of opposing interests, should, as it moves along its track, be covered with this perpetual dust of censure and detraction. The law is the most positive of sciences, and the most vigorous of human forces. In its practical application to the affairs of men, it is perpetually compelling an unwilling submission to its demands. It makes men give up property which they want to keep, to pay debts which they prefer to owe or to avoid, and to perform obligations which they seek to break. It is perpetually dealing its blows and driving its bolts in the attack or support of some interest of person, or property, or public, or social order. Those who practice it as a profession are necessarily placed in an attitude of perpetual antagonism to members or classes of the community, to individuals or bodies of men. must, therefore, need be that offences come; and the profession, as a class, has often to assume the defensive against criticism and attack and to re-assert the principles by which its action is guided and governed." Macon, Ga. WALTER B. HILL. It VOL. III. NO. I.-2 |