comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of
the fiercest trials. He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer.
Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of
nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to
survive it. No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, "Yah! nailmaker," or to Mr.
Balfour, "Yah! landlord," thinking he had disposed of them. Why should you
suppose that when you have said "Yah! lawyer" to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd
George you have disposed of them?

Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people--brewers, or
soap boilers, or bankers? I doubt it. They are just the average, and
include good and bad like any other class. Judge Jeffreys was a monster;
but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who
largely saved the liberties of this country. I doubt whether the world has
ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln. And
he was a lawyer. I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such
financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made. He had a practice at the Bar
which, I believe, brought him in L10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself
to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he
gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought
him more than L5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable
seat on the Woolsack and L10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the
House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman.
Ah, you say, but look at the glory. Well, look at it. I would, as Danton
said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of
men. It is the most ungrateful calling on earth. And, whatever other
defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing
as glory is not one of them. You will discover more passion for glory in
Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five
years. And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.

But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis. It is an
old dislike. You remember that remark of Johnson's when he was asked on a
certain occasion who was the man who had left the room: "I don't like
saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; _but I believe he is
an attorney."_ And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a
barrister as "a loaded blunde