w regard as an unworthy art. The first requisite
is to feel deeply--to have a message--and then if you are a person of
fair intelligence and in good health, you'll impress your hearers. But
to hire out to impress people with another's theme is to be a
pettifogger, and the genus pettifogger has nearly had his day.

History moves in circles. The Chicago Common Council, weary of rhetoric,
has recently declined to listen to paid attorneys; but any citizen who
speaks for himself and his neighbors can come before the Council and
state his case.

Chief Justice Fuller has given it as his opinion that there will come a
day in America when damage-cases will be taken care of by an automatic
tribunal, without the help of lawyers. And as a man fills out a request
for a money-order at the Post-Office, so will he file his claim for
damages, and it will have attention. The contingent fee will yet be a
misdemeanor. Also, it will be possible for plain citizens to be able to
go before a Court of Equity and be heard without regard to law and
precedent and attorney's quillets and quibbles, which so often hamper
justice. Justice should be cheap and easy, instead of costly and
complex.

Evidently the Chief Justice had in mind the usages in the time of King
Alfred, when the barrister was an employee of the court, and his
business was to get the facts and then explain them to the King in the
fewest possible words.

Alfred considered a paid advocate, or even a counselor, as without the
pale, and such men were never allowed at court. If the barrister
accepted a fee from a man suing for justice, he was disbarred.

Finally, however, the practise of feeing in order to renew the zeal of a
barrister grew so that it had to be tolerated, because things we can't
suppress we license, and a pocket was placed on each barrister's back
between his shoulders where he could not reach it without taking off his
gown, and into this pocket clients were allowed slyly to slip such
gratuities as they could afford.

But the general practise of the client paying the barrister, instead of
the court, was not adopted for several hundred years later, and then it
was regarded as an expeditious move to keep down litigation and punish
the client for being fool enough not to settle his own troubles.

In England the rudimentary pocket still survives, like the buttons on
the back of a coat, which were once used to support the sword-belt.

In America we have done away wit