so intimately interwoven as to be
practically one and the same question. The international question is,
can we get a new Germany? The national question everywhere is, can we
get a better politician?

The widely prevalent discontent with the part played by the lawyer in
the affairs of all the Western Allies is certain to develop into a
vigorous agitation for legal reconstruction. In the case of every other
great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions.
The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of
protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon unskilled labour, for
which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual
serfdom that the nation's needs might be supplied; the medical
profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the
front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in
any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry of Munitions is full of
unpaid workers, and so on.

The British legal profession and trade union alone has made no sign of
any disposition to relax its elaborate restrictions upon the labour of
amateurs and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its habitual
rewards. There has been no attempt to reduce the costly law officers of
the Government, for example, or to call in the help of older men or
women to release law officers who are of military experience or age.

And I must admit that there are small signs of the advent of the "new
lawyer," at whose possibility I have just flung a hopeful glance, to
replace the existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness. Barristers seem to
age prematurely--at least in Great Britain--unless they are born old. In
the legal profession one hears nothing of "the young"; one hears only of
"smart juniors." Reform and progressive criticism in the legal
profession, unlike all other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the
retired.

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only beginning to feel the real
stresses of the war; she is coming into the full strain a year behind
France, Germany, and Russia; and after the war there lies the
possibility of still more violent stresses; so that what is as yet a
mere cloud of criticism and resentment at our lawyer-politicians and
privileged legal profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 or
1919.

I am inclined to foretell as one most highly probable development of the
present vague but very considerable revolt again