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The Green Bag
questioning its oldest practices as freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life, and stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical recon struction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous co-opera tion can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society as we were once in a temper to re construct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modifi cation in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic and political practice. "I do not speak of these things in appre hension, because all is open and above board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret. The whole stupendous programme is planned and canvassed in the open, and we have learned the rules of the game of change. Good temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful and unselfish men, the habit of co-operation and of compromise which has been bred in us by long years of free government, in which reason rather than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and universal debate, will enable us to win through
still another great age without revolution. I speak in plain terms of the real character of what is now patent to every man merely in order to fix your thought upon the fact that this thing that is going on about us is not a mere warfare of opinion. It has an object, a definite and concrete object, and that object is Law, the alteration of institu tions upon an extended plan of change. "We are lawyers. This is the field of our knowledge. We are servants of society, ol‘ficers of the courts of justice. Our duty is a much larger thing than the mere advice of private clients. In every deliberate struggle for law we ought to be the guides, not too critical and unwilling, not too tena cious of the familiar technicalities in which we have been schooled, not too much in love with precedents and the easy maxims which have saved us the trouble of thinking, but ready to give expert and disinterested advice to those who purpose progress and the read justment of the frontiers of justice. . . . “Constitutional lawyers have fallen into the background. We have relegated them to the Supreme Court, without asking our selves where we are to find them when va
cancies occur in that great tribunal. A new type of lawyers has been created; and that new type has come to be the prevailing type. Lawyers have been sucked into the maelstrom of the new business system of the country. That system is highly technical and highly specialized. It is divided into distinct sections and provinces, each with particular legal problems of its own. Lawyers, therefore, everywhere that business has thickened and had
a
large
development,
have
become
experts in some special technical field. They do not practice law. They do not handle the general, miscellaneous interests of society. They are not general counselors of right and obligation. They do not bear the relation to the business of their neighborhoods that the family doctor bears to the health of the community in which he lives. They do not concern themselves with the universal aspects of society. . . . "And so society has lost something, or is losing it——something which it is very serious to lose in an age of law, when society depends more than ever before upon the law-giver and the courts for its structural steel, the
harmony and co-ordination of its parts, its convenience, its permanency, and its facility. In gaining new functions, in being drawn into modern business instead of standing outside of it, in becoming identified with particular interests instead of holding aloof and impartially advising all interests, the lawyer has lost his old function, is looked askance at in politics, must disavow special engagements if he would have his counsel heeded in matters of common concern. Society has suffered a corresponding loss-—at least American society has. It has lost its one time feeling for law as the basis of its peace, its progress, its prosperity. Lawyers are not now regarded as the mediators of progress. Society was always ready to be prejudiced against them; now it finds its prejudice confirmed. "Meanwhile look what legal questions are to be settled—how stupendous they are, how far-reaching, and how impossible it will be to settle them without the advice of learned and experienced lawyers! We have wit nessed in modern business the submergence of the individual within the organization,
and yet the increase to an extraordinary degree of the power of the individual—of the individual who happens to control the organization. Most men are individuals no
