The judges, moreover, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are appointed from among the leading barristers, an arrangement that a child can see is demoralising and inadvisable.  And in Great Britain all the greatest salaries in the government service are reserved for the legal profession.  The greatest prizes, therefore, before an energetic young man who has to make his way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and his line of advancement to these lies, for all the best years of his life, not through the public service, but through the private practice of advocacy.  The higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain, produces under the stimulus of these conditions an advocate as its finest flower.  To go from the posing and chatter of the Union Debating Society to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce ambition.  Few men of exceptional energy will do that.

The national consequences of this state of affairs have been only too manifest throughout the conduct of the war.  The British Government has developed all the strength and all the weakness of the great profession it represents.  It has been uninventive, dilatory, and without initiative; it has been wasteful and evasive; but it has not been wanting in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been wary and shrewd, and it has held on to office with the concentrated skill and determination of a sucker-fish.  And the British mind, with a concentration and intensity unprecedented before the war, is speculating how it can contrive to get a different sort of ruler and administrator at work upon its affairs.

There is a disposition in the Press, and much of the private talk one hears, to get rid of lawyers from the control of national affairs altogether, to substitute “business men” or scientific men or “experts.”  That way lies dictatorship and Caesarism.  And even Great Britain is not so heedless of the experiences of other nations as to attempt again what has already been so abundantly worked out in national disaster across the Channel.  The essential business of government is to deal between man and man; it is not to manage the national affairs in detail, but to secure the proper managers, investigators, administrators, generals, and so forth, to maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance between them.  We cannot do without a special class of men for these interventions and controls.  In other words, we cannot do without a special class of politicians.  They may be elected by a public or appointed by an autocrat; at some point they have to come in.  And this business of intervening between men and classes and departments in public life, and getting them to work together, is so closely akin to the proper work of a lawyer in dealing between men and men, that, unless the latter are absolutely barred from becoming the former, it is almost unavoidable that politicians should be drawn more abundantly from the lawyer class than from any other class in the community.