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The Green Bag
terrible indictment against the Court of Chancery, but wholly failed to state in the preface to his novel that most of the defects which he had so graphically illustrated had been abolished by act of Parliament before "Bleak House" was printed. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce would be an impossibility today, and was an impossibility at the time "Bleak House" was written, but the entire legal pro fession could not with all its eloquence correct the popular impression to which the genius of Dickens has given rise. "Bleak House" was published in August, 1853, and Dickens in the preface asserts the substantial truth of his indictment against the Court of Chancery, but he fails to state that three years before his novel was written, Romilly, Lord St. Leonards and Lord Lyndhurst had se cured an investigation of Chancery abuses and that subsequent legislation by Parliament put an end to many of the defects of the Chancery system so vividly and powerfully illustrated by Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. Similarly, Dr. Warren in "Ten Thous and a Year," the greatest masterpiece of fiction with reference to law and lawyers, bases the argument of his story upon defects of legal procedure which had already passed away. The law is and must necessarily be a reflex of contemporaneous society. It is no better, and it is no worse. Given a corrupt and cruel state of society, such as existed in the eighteenth cen tury, and you necessarily have a cor rupt and cruel system of laws. Espe cially in these days of triumphant democracy, the law is what the mass of men make it, and yet the great public, primarily responsible for the defects of the law, condemns the legal profession for whatever defects larger knowledge from time to time discloses. The laws of former times reflected the corruption
and cruelty of the times, and it is not surprising that the mass of men, who groaned under such burdens, regarded laws as a kind of witchcraft or black art. The prejudice has long outlived its cause. Many generations of men have been influenced by a misinterpre tation of the invective of the great Teacher:— Woe unto you; also ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. The theologian knows that of which the congregation is generally ignorant that "the lawyers" who taxed too sorely the patience of the gentle Master were simply the clerical copyists of the Mosaic Law, and, as such, we of the legal pro fession willingly resign them to our brethren of the clergy. I am persuaded, however, that the chief reason for the unpopularity of the lawyer is due to the fact that men get their impressions of law and of the lawyer through the medium of fiction, and very little from personal observation, and it has always been the tendency of the poet, the novelist or the dramatist to select unfavorable and exaggerated types to give dramatic intensity to their productions. An honorable lawyer is too prosaic for literary portraiture. The lay figure of the dramatist and the novelist must be the worst type of the profession, and he so readily lends him self to "treason, stratagems and spoils," that it is not unnatural that the type of lawyer most familiar to the popular mind is the picturesque villain who cunningly thwarts virtue and promotes evil. While Shakspere gives no por trait of a lawyer, unless we except the fair Portia, who so terribly perverted the law of Venice, yet, as previously noted, he has made many scornful refer ences to the "law's delay," and to its
