It is idle to suppose that a master of the art of advocacy
will merely confine himself to a calm, dispassionate statement of the
facts and arguments of his side. He will inevitably use all his powers
of rhetoric and persuasion to make the cause for which he holds a brief
appear true, though he knows it to be false; he will affect a warmth
which he does not feel and a conviction which he does not hold; he will
skilfully avail himself of any mistake or omission of his opponent; of
any technical rule that can exclude damaging evidence; of all the
resources that legal subtlety and severe cross-examination can furnish
to confuse dangerous issues, to obscure or minimise inconvenient facts,
to discredit hostile witnesses. He will appeal to every prejudice that
can help his cause; he will for the time so completely identify himself
with it that he will make its success his supreme and all-absorbing
object; and he will hardly fail to feel some thrill of triumph if by the
force of ingenious and eloquent pleading he has saved the guilty from
his punishment or snatched a verdict in defiance of evidence.

It is not surprising that a profession which inevitably leads to such
things should have excited scruples among many good men. Swift very
roughly described lawyers as 'a society of men bred from their youth in
the art of proving by words, multiplied for the purpose, that white is
black and black is white, according as they are paid.' Dr. Arnold has
more than once expressed his dislike, and indeed abhorrence, of the
profession of an advocate. It inevitably, he maintained, leads to moral
perversion, involving, as it does, the indiscriminate defence of right
and wrong, and in many cases the knowing suppression of truth. Macaulay,
who can hardly be regarded as addicted to the refinements of an
over-fastidious morality, reviewing the professional rules that are
recognised in England, asks 'whether it be right that not merely
believing, but knowing a statement to be true, he should do all that can
be done by sophistry, by rhetoric, by solemn asseveration, by indignant
exclamation, by gesture, by play of features, by terrifying one honest
witness, by perplexing another, to cause a jury to think that statement
false.' Bentham denounced in even stronger language the habitual method
of 'the hireling lawyer' in cross-examining an honest but adverse
witness, and he declared that there is a code of morality current in
Westminster Hall genericall