Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 16.pdf/278

 The Lawyer: a Pest or a Panacea? of generating pestilence, they prevent it. Their function is to change decaying sub stances into new and useful forms, to trans mute by their subtle alchemy poisons into cordials, the refuse of slums into food-pro ducing forces. And now my fears were quite allayed. If the lawyer is a pest, he is of the kind on which East Side humanity flourishes. He is of the beneficial, not of the destructive sort. Recall the statistics of lawyers in the lead ing nations. China has none. Russia has a lawyer for every thirty-one thousand inJiahutants; Germany, one to eighty-seven hundred: France, one to forty-one hundred; England, one to eleven hundred; the United States, one to seven hundred. Bear in mind the history of the legal profession and its function in developing legal rules, and I am sure that you will agree with me that if the lawyer is a pest, he is a liberty-loving, free dom-promoting, property-guarding pest. At present, there are many signs that popular opinion of the legal profession is veering to quite the opposite direction from that which it formerly held, and that the lawyer is hereafter to be deemed not so much a pest as a panacea. The submission of the momentous coalstrike controversy to the judgement of a com mission has given a mighty impetus to the policy of arbitration for all great disputes between labor and capital. Do not under stand me to prophesy that a labor millenium has been ushered in. But I am quite willing to venture the assertion that more and more, as the years pass, will arbitration supplant violence as a means of composing differences between employers and em ployed. Strikes and picketing on the one side as well as lockouts and military repres sion on the other, are to give way either to voluntary or compulsory arbitration, which is but another mode of expression for the friendly or the forced law suit. In every such proceeding, the prominent figure, the

233

leading spirit, the dominant influence must be that of the lawyer. Another indication of the growing in fluence of the legal profession is found in the numerous world-propositions now before the public. Not only have we international copy right, an international postal union, and countless international conferences, but we have an international banking corporation chartered by Connecticut to do business any where in the world. Not to be outdone by her smaller neighbor, Massachusetts has entertained a proposition for a world legis lature. I do not understand that the Gen eral Court of that State deemed itself competent to set up a legislature for the world; but it did receive a petition for the establishment of a parliament of nations, de clared it meritorious, and commended it to favorable action by our Federal Congress. Moreover, this proposition has received the support of the American Peace Society as well as of a multitude of individual petition ers. If such a legislature is launched, can any one doubt that it will be manned chiefly by lawyers? Our national experience furnishes a fair indication of what may be expected in this regard. One-half of our representatives in Congress, two-thirds of our senators and three-fourths of our Presidents have been members of the legal profession. Moreover, a world-legislature would necessitate a world judiciary and a retinue of lawyers specially trained in this new juris prudence. With the opening of such out lets for legal talents and acquirements, our law schools will multiply and enlarge more rapidly even than during the past decade. It may be that such a scheme is but a fig ment of the imagination; or, at least, that it is not to be realized in our age; that if "a parliament of man, a federation of the world" is to be achieved, "And the kindly earth to slumber, lapt in universal law," such achieve ment is vet afar off. But the mere fact that