Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law’s consequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is the political profession.  It delights in false issues and merely technical politics.  Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons the barristers have ousted other types of men from political power.  The decline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House of Lawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by the people for the people as by the barristers for the barristers.  They set the tone of political life.  And since they are the most specialised, the most specifically trained of all the professions, since their training is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive artist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since the business is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidence and advantages, and not with understanding, they are the least statesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a tone as hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs as one could well imagine.  They do not want to deal at all with great and urgent social needs.  They play a game, a long and interesting game, with parties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player with prominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that game involves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws them into participation and angry interference, the better for the steady development of the politician’s career.  A distinguished and active fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is the political barrister’s ideal career.  To achieve that, he must maintain legal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political life by living interests.  And so far as he has any views about Labour beyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regard getting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as the highest good.

And it is with such men that our insurgent modern Labour, with its vaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotional reactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in the social body.  It is one of the main factors in the progressive embitterment of the Labour situation that whatever business is afoot—­arbitration, conciliation, inquiry—­our contemporary system presents itself to Labour almost invariably in a legal guise.  The natural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality of attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this great and necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade.  Little reasonable things from the lawyers’ point of view—­the rejection, for example, of certain evidence in the Titanic inquiry because it might amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and checking of a Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial points—­irritate quite disproportionately.