n, which is the democracy that has been most under
the close observation of the present prophet, there is at present a
great outcry against the "politician," and more particularly against the
"lawyer-politician." He is our embarrassment. In him we personify all
our difficulties. Let us consider the charges against this individual.
Let us ask, can we do without him? And let us further see what chances
there may be of so altering, qualifying, or balancing him as to minimise
the evil of his influence. To begin with, let us run over the essentials
of the charge against him.

It is with a modest blush that the present prophet recapitulates these
charges. So early as the year 1902 he was lifting up his voice, not
exactly in the wilderness but at least in the Royal Institution, against
the legal as compared with the creative or futurist type of mind. The
legal mind, he insisted, looks necessarily to the past. It is dilatory
because it has no sense of coming things, it is uninventive and
wasteful, it does not create, it takes advantage. It is the type of mind
least able, under any circumstances, to organise great businesses, to
plan campaigns, to adventure or achieve. "Wait and see" crystallises its
spirit. Its resistance is admirable, and it has no "go." Nevertheless
there is a tendency for power to gravitate in all democratic countries
to the lawyer.

In the British system the normal faults of the lawyer are enhanced, and
his predominance intensified, by certain peculiarities of our system. In
the first place, he belongs to a guild of exceptional power. In Britain
it happens that the unfortunate course was taken ages ago of bribing the
whole legal profession to be honest. The British judges and law officers
are stupendously overpaid in order to make them incorruptible; it is a
poor but perhaps a well-merited compliment to their professional code.
We have squared the whole profession to be individually unbribable.

The judges, moreover, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are appointed from
among the leading barristers, an arrangement that a child can see is
demoralising and inadvisable. And in Great Britain all the greatest
salaries in the government service are reserved for the legal
profession. The greatest prizes, therefore, before an energetic young
man who has to make his way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and
his line of advancement to these lies, for all the best years of his
life, not through the public service,