The British legal profession and trade union alone has made no sign of any disposition to relax its elaborate restrictions upon the labour of amateurs and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its habitual rewards.  There has been no attempt to reduce the costly law officers of the Government, for example, or to call in the help of older men or women to release law officers who are of military experience or age.

And I must admit that there are small signs of the advent of the “new lawyer,” at whose possibility I have just flung a hopeful glance, to replace the existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness.  Barristers seem to age prematurely—­at least in Great Britain—­unless they are born old.  In the legal profession one hears nothing of “the young”; one hears only of “smart juniors.”  Reform and progressive criticism in the legal profession, unlike all other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the retired.

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only beginning to feel the real stresses of the war; she is coming into the full strain a year behind France, Germany, and Russia; and after the war there lies the possibility of still more violent stresses; so that what is as yet a mere cloud of criticism and resentment at our lawyer-politicians and privileged legal profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 or 1919.

I am inclined to foretell as one most highly probable development of the present vague but very considerable revolt against the lawyer in British public life, first, some clumsy proposals or even attempts to leave him out, and use “business men,” soldiers, admirals, dictators, or men of science, in his place—­which is rather like throwing away a blottesque fountain-pen and trying to write with a walking-stick or a revolver or a flash-light—­and then when that is found to be impossible, a resolute attempt to clean and reconstitute the legal profession on modern and more honourable lines; a movement into which, quite possibly, a number of the younger British lawyers, so soon as they realise that the movement is good enough to risk careers upon, may throw themselves.  A large share in such a reform movement, if it occurs, will be brought about by the Press; by which I mean not simply the periodical Press, but all books and contemporary discussion.  It is only by the natural playing off of Press against lawyer-politician that democratic States can ever come to their own.

And that brings me to the second part of this question, which is whether, quite apart from the possible reform and spiritual rebirth of the legal profession, there is not also the possibility of balancing and correcting its influence.  In ancient Hebrew history—­it may be a warning rather than a precedent—­there were two great forces, one formal, conservative and corrupting, the other undisciplined, creative, and destructive; the first was the priest, the second the prophet.  Their interaction is being extraordinarily paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon democracies by the interaction of lawyer-politician and Press to-day.