There is no more reason nowadays why a lawyer should look to advocacy as a proper use of his knowledge than that a doctor should make private poisoning the lucrative side of his profession.  There is no reason why a court of law should ignore the plain right of the commonweal to intervene in every case between man and man.  There is every reason why trivial disputes about wills and legitimacy should not be wasting our national resources at the present time, when nearly every other form of waste is being restrained.  The sound case against the legal profession in Anglo-Saxon countries is not that it is unnecessary, but that it is almost incredibly antiquated, almost incredibly careless of the public well-being, and that it corrupts or dwarfs all the men who enter it.

Our urgent need is not so much to get rid of the lawyer from our affairs as to get rid of the wig and gown spirit and of the special pleader, and to find and develop the new lawyer, the lawyer who is not an advocate, who is not afraid of a code, who has had some scientific education, and whose imagination has been quickened by the realisation of life as creative opportunity.  We want to emancipate this profession from its ancient guild restrictions—­the most anti-social and disastrous of all such restrictions—­to destroy its disgraceful traditions of over-payment and fee-snatching, to insist upon a scientific philosophical training for its practitioners, to make the practice of advocacy a fall from grace, and to bar professional advocates from the bench.

In the British trenches now there must be many hundreds of fine young lawyers, still but little corrupted, who would be only too glad to exchange the sordid vulgarities and essential dishonour of a successful lawyer’s career under the old conditions for lives of service and statecraft....

No observer of the general trend of events in Europe will get any real grasp of what is happening until he realises the cardinal importance of the reactions that centre upon this question.  The current development of political institutions and the possible development of a new spirit and method in the legal profession are so intimately interwoven as to be practically one and the same question.  The international question is, can we get a new Germany?  The national question everywhere is, can we get a better politician?

The widely prevalent discontent with the part played by the lawyer in the affairs of all the Western Allies is certain to develop into a vigorous agitation for legal reconstruction.  In the case of every other great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions.  The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of protective restrictions upon women’s labour, upon unskilled labour, for which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual serfdom that the nation’s needs might be supplied; the medical profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry of Munitions is full of unpaid workers, and so on.