Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/54

28 28 HARVARD LAW REVIEW, posed to young lawyers in this city elaborate schemes of knavery, without previous reason for the clients to believe that the lawyers would approve of such knavery. In one or two instances the young lawyer temporized in order to call in some brother lawyer that the scheme might be detailed before witnesses merely as an incredible curiosity. Probably there is not at the bar to-day an experienced member of honorable standing who has not had at the bidding of the laity a high-priced chance to depart secretly from his record. Fate decrees that trouble and legal problems in a particular piece of law business are great just as the amount involved in that business is small. But despite this, the entire bulk of petty work being done for charity at any given time by our bar in this city would probably exceed the whole law business of many a county town. A few years ago a member of our bar found in his safe a bundle done up in an old red handkerchief. It had been left there by a person then several years dead, known to be eccentric, and believed to be needy. This lawyer discovered that it con- tained, in such form that he might have appropriated it and none been the wiser, a considerable fortune. He promptly hunted up the kin of the deceased owner, and handed this find over to them. His chosen calling had not contaminated him. It is one of the hardships of practice here, that the bar is so ex- tensive that no lawyer can be acquainted, even by reputation, with all of it, and on undertaking any new piece of business he must be prepared to meet the best or the worst the bar affords. If he meets a hundred new lawyers each year, he must have a practice of many years and great variety to meet the whole bar. If he encounters an example of the worst, he must not only attend to the merits of his client's case, but exercise other wisdom born only of experience, and not to be had at a law school. That a lawyer's conduct should meet a high standard, every- body admits as an abstract proposition. The General Term of the Supreme Court and the Bar Association aie nominally ready to maintain this. As a matter of fact, whoever tries to start this machinery to work to realize this principle in a given case has his labor for his pains. The average character of our bar is high, perhaps was never more so; but the history of our bar from the days of the Tweed regime shows that it is quite impossible to say just what a man niay not do and still practise in our courts.