Page:The Art of Cross-Examination.djvu/20

 of confining court practice to a comparatively limited number of trained trial lawyers.

The distinction between general practitioners and specialists is already established in the medical profession and largely accepted by the public. Who would think nowadays of submitting himself to a serious operation at the hands of his family physician, instead of calling in an experienced surgeon to handle the knife? And yet the family physician may have once been competent to play the part of surgeon, and doubtless has had, years ago, his quota of hospital experience. But he so infrequently enters the domain of surgery that he shrinks from undertaking it, except under circumstances where there is no alternative. There should be a similar distinction in the legal profession. The family lawyer may have once been competent to conduct the litigation; but he is out of practice—he is not "in training" for the competition.

There is no short cut, no royal road to proficiency, in the art of advocacy. It is experience, and one might almost say experience alone, that brings success. I am not speaking of that small minority of men in all walks of life who have been touched by the magic wand of genius, but of men of average endowments and even special aptitude for the calling of advocacy; with them it is a race of experience. The experienced advocate can look back upon those less advanced in years or experience, and rest content in the thought that they are just