Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/182

 The Relative Influence of the Lawyer in Modern Life not relate to litigated cases, as to which he is obliged to take a public position, but in explaining to his clients what they may lawfully do and how they may do it. As law is essentially applied morality, the lawyer in enforcing its principles without litigation does more to promote justice between man and man than any other profession. He rarely can secure absolute right, because absolute right in a complicated state of human society is rarely attainable. Life is an eternal compromise, and the lawyer cannot rise superior to the conditions under which he works. Many a dis appointed litigant has had a poor opinion of the law, and, therefore, of lawyers, either because he has not obtained full absolute justice, or because he is a vic tim of those general rules of human society, such as the statutes of limita tions, which, though they work hard ship in individual cases, are most necessary and salutary as rules of gen eral application. The public before con demning the legal profession should always appreciate that the administra tion of justice is necessarily but an approximation toward that ultimate and absolute justice which may come with the millennium, but never before. There is between the justice of the courts and absolute Justice a "twilight zone," to use Mr. Bryan's recent phrase, which the genius of man has not yet succeeded in spanning. Moreover, the average case is a tangled skein of disputed facts, in which the lawyer necessarily accepts his client's version. In the average liti gated case, no one side is wholly right. Upon the court, and not upon the lawyer, rests the ultimate responsibility of determining the law and the facts, and even then it must be said of legal justice, as George Eliot sadly said, in the great climax to "Romola":— Who can put his finger on an act and say

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"This is Justice"? Justice is like the kingdom of God; it is not without us as a fact, but within us as a great yearning. The belief in the lawyer's insincerity has arisen largely from the least im portant feature of his professional life, his duties as an advocate. Unquestion ably in former times there was much cheap acting in courts of justice, and the "chops and tomato sauce" style of argument of Serjeant Buzfuz, while somewhat of a caricature, has yet some basis in fact; but the graduates whom I have the honor to address are most fortunate in coming to the bar at a time when the blustering artifice of a rhetorical hireling availing himself of the vile license of a loosetongued lawyer, as Disraeli once styled an attack which a lawyer made upon him, is out of fashion, and today candor, lucidity and sincerity are the most forceful elements in advocacy. In his work as an advocate, the lawyer is apt to make his client's enemies his own. The latter is not apt to distin guish in the heat of a legal battle be tween his opponent and the opposing lawyer. In cases where human passion is excited and great interests are at stake, the lawyer is too apt, in winning a case, to add to his personal associa tions a life-long enemy and—sometimes an ingrate. Again, the lawyer is unjustly held responsible for all the defects of the law, for most of which he is not responsible. The nobility of law makes but little appeal to men, but its inevitable limita tions—owing in part to the fallibility of human nature, and the necessary limita tions of organized society—have never failed to escape their attention. Thus the "law's delay" has been the fruitful theme of the poet and the satirist. Dickens, in "Bleak House," preferred a