In active practise never forget that you are a sworn officer of justice quite as much as is the judge on the bench.  It is impossible for you to put your ideals of your profession too high or to attach yourself to them too firmly.  I am no admirer of the acidulous character of John Adams (not that he was not both great and good, however, for he was—­but he was too sour), yet he announced a great thing, and lived up to it, when he declared that he was practising law for the purposes of justice first and a living afterward. (But, then, John Adams announced many great things; and what he announced he lived up to.  He was supremely honest.)

“Never take a case,” said Horace Mann, “unless you believe your client is right and his cause is just.”  On the contrary, Lord Brougham declared that “the conscientious lawyer must be at the service of the criminal as well as of the state.”  And this great lawyer proceeds to argue with characteristic ability that it is as much the duty of the lawyer to work for the cause he knows to be wrong as for the cause he knows to be right.

Briefly, the reason is that it is the very essence of justice that every man shall have his day in court; that the attorney is but the trained and educated mouthpiece of his client; and that to refuse the cause of a client in which the attorney does not believe is to relegate all the controversies to the judge in the first instance, which, of course, would render the administration of practical justice impossible.

This is the prevailing practise of our profession, and it is a serious thing to question its correctness.  Its ethics are as wide as they are ingenious, and when one beholds them through the medium of the great Englishman’s wonderful argument they seem radiant with aggressive truth.  Nevertheless, I am almost of opinion that Horace Mann was right.  It is certain that in his beginnings the young lawyer ought to lean to that view.

If you consider it your duty to take any side of any case that offers, right or wrong, it is no far cry to considering it your duty to make the cause you have espoused a good one before the court.  And when that conception has shot its cancerous roots and filaments through your brain and conscience, the suggestion to your unscrupulous client of facts that do not exist, and all the alluring infamies of sharp practise, are possible.

It is said that burglary exercises such a fascination that, once the delirium of its danger is tasted, a man can never put that fatal wine away.  An old and distinguished lawyer once told me that one of the most brilliant young lawyers he ever knew said to him, at the conclusion of a legal duel in which he had resorted to the sharpest practise and won, “That was the most delicious experience of my life.”

Yes, and it was the most fatal.  He became, and is, an attorney of uncommon resource, ability, and success, with many cases and heavy fees; nevertheless his life is a failure, for his profession and even his clients know him for a dealer in tricks.  Senator McDonald, an ideal lawyer in the ethics, learning, and practise of his profession, told me that one of the justices of the Supreme Court once said to him of a certain great corporation lawyer of acknowledged power and almost unrivaled learning: