The gray-haired school-teacher or commonplace preacher, who realizes that he should have been a merchant, lawyer, doctor or civil engineer, is pathetic. To know what to try to do is the great problem, and it may be that even the men who succeed in their chosen calling could have rendered mankind better service in some other field.
Henry Brougham’s shrewd old mother bewailed his quitting the House of Commons to don the robes of Lord Chancellor: Dr. Samuel Johnson lamented the fate which never gave him a chance to try his hand in Parliament: Edmund Burke writhed under Goldsmith’s famous lashing of him “who to party gave up what was meant for mankind.”
What is it that draws the most ambitious men of modern times into “the study of law”?
The reward, of course. All things considered, no other profession offers so great a return upon the investment of time, talent and industry.
While the nations are standing in arms, clothed in steel from head to foot, the purpose is not so much to fight as to discourage attack from without and insurrection from within. The standing army gives the education whose watchword is “_Obey!_” It cultivates the class-pride and prejudice upon which caste rule is built. It interests millions of citizens in the maintenance of “Law and Order”--the law which imposes the yoke of the ruling caste and the order which restrains its victims from revolt.
The military profession, therefore, is one which irresistibly attracts very many aspirants to influence, to position, to power; but even the military profession does not win over so many ambitious young men as does “the study of the law.”
In the building up of our civilization we have complicated matters to such an extent that the lawyer is indispensable, almost omnipotent.
Does the layman know anything about his own rights as a citizen? Very little. Upon the simplest things only is he informed. At every turn he finds himself under the necessity of getting help from the lawyer. Great is the corporation--the bank, the railroad, the trust--but the corporation dares not move a step without a lawyer in the pilot-house.
From the Justice’s Court in the rural district and the Mayor’s Court in the village, all the way up to Presidential policies and Governmental problems, the lawyer is the doctor who must be called in to look at the tongue of the difficulty, and to write out a prescription.