Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very grave national misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloud for statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public life should be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this most able and illiberal profession.

Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves at once deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, and either helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, the professional politician, has become a very urgent matter.  To destroy him, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it is necessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains him, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put the independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the party nominee.  Such a method is to be found in proportional representation with large constituencies, and to that we must look for our ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politician barristers.  But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennial release, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that every reasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of some trouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great and acute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer’s and mere politician’s hands and in his own.  Leave Labour to the lawyers, and we shall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over.  They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreements full of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will make reputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional training have made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!

Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side, they may yet bring about an English one.  These men below there are still, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to take orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility.  They make the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certain assurances and certain latitudes.  Implicit rather than expressed is their demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the great surplus and freedom of civilisation are given.  It is an entirely reasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal.  But we have got to treat them fairly and openly.  This patience and reasonableness and willingness for leadership is not limitless.  It is no good scoring our mean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contract and all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won’t abide by agreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing power of money has declined.  When they made that agreement they did not think of that possibility.  When they