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XII

ADDRESS BEFORE THE LAW SOCIETY OF LONDON⭑*

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Your professional colleagues in the United States have keen satisfaction in the opportunity of meeting you at the scene of your professional activities. I have to express, on behalf of my associates and myself, sincere thanks and appreciation to this organization and to all the other law associations of England and Canada, for their bountiful hospitality. If you have been staggered at our numbers, we have been equally overcome by the cordiality of your reception.

American lawyers delight in the traditions of your bar. But English fiction has not suffered us to idealize you; and it is not without some comfort that such classics as Campbell's Lives show that you also have some of the human frailties which our critics do not fail to attribute to us. But, fortunately, the American bar has not been dependent upon satirical literature or overcandid biography for its contact with the profession in England; for in impressive succession eminent British lawyers and judges have visited us. Lord Russell of Killowen came after he had ascended to the bench. Came then Viscount Haldane, the erudite philosopher of your bar, now again returned to the Woolsack. Next

* Delivered July 22, 1924, upon the occasion of the visit to England of over 3000 members of the American Bar Association.

came Mr. Isaacs, and later as Lord Reading, the Chief Justice, exhibiting to us those incisive and practical qualities for which he is justly famed. Viscount Cave during the war spoke to us of international law. Sir John Simon followed; a leader among eminent lawyers. The learning of Lord Shaw edified us while his engaging personality set us all to reading his Letters to Isabel. Finally, the brilliant gifts of Frederick E. Smith captivated us; and his bold versatility edified us when last year, as Lord Birkenhead, he expounded our own Constitution.

We can hardly expect to equal such a brilliant galaxy upon a single visit.

But we have seen mainly two groups, those distinguished in the forum or on the bench. We have not greeted many of your great solicitors and your eminent barristers and jurisconsults, whose advice has buttressed great enterprises. Not less-I make an estimate, from which some may dissent-but, probably not less than 90 per cent of the time of American lawyers is occupied with office work-the business of solicitors. And in that occupation we do not think that we are engaging in what would justly classify us in a grade inferior to the rest of the profession. So, if you will come to our country you will find yourselves in sympathy with the great mass of our practicing lawyers.

But the historical traditions of the profession in England center largely around the advocate. That is natural and is equally the tendency in America. It does not, however, contribute to a just estimate of the profession as a factor in our civilization, for it is the solicitor who is the great constructive force in the practice of law. The advocate is an actor in that phase of life that Judge

Parry has recently called the "drama of the law"-that which elicits applause or evokes reprobation, but always excites interest. In America the advocate has become qualified, not by formal investiture but by a process of selection, based on aptitude, on taste, on experience, or, perhaps upon fortuitous circumstance. In much of our work we American lawyers know not whether we would be classified as solicitors or barristers; in theoretical liability to our clients we are solicitors; in the finality of our advice, barristers. The large majority of our bar rarely attempt advocacy. They are content, as a querulous old barrister said of solicitors seventy-five years ago, to distinguish themselves "only by useful, quiet and unambitious respectability."

Our method may tend to give to the general practitioner a broader experience; it does not, however, secure, except among the few, the expertness acquired by your barrister; nor does it create such an effective school of training for the bench. But the separation into two grades is hardly possible in a new civilization. It does not generally prevail in your colonies and dominions; and it will probably never be attempted in America.

American lawyers have the gratification springing from the confidential relation of lawyer and client. Think of being deprived, as your barristers are, of the stimulation of contact with anxious, officious and frequently carping clients, male and female! They have no such means of purification through suffering. To practice law without a client-it is alluring—indeed ideal-but, it is not war! How much the barrister misses! Yet there is compensation in letting unsuccessful clients' lamentations fall on the unfortunate head of the solicitor. And I suppose the fixing of the blame

on the barrister for an untoward result is a solace to the solicitor. But we American lawyers are no less interested in the functions of one of the two orders than in the other. We regard them as of equal dignity, commanding similar moral and intellectual qualities, and as engaged in the noble pursuit of securing rights and punishing wrongs according to the majestic principles of the common law.

During the last few days you have heard all you want to hear about the common law. We have installed a system of instruction in the common law which is turning out from our law schools young gentlemen of talent who become adept in every branch of the common law after a course of three or four years. But we are concerned about the administration of the system,the machinery by which we seek to enforce the law. Law reform is playing a conspicuous part in the activities of the American bar. We have but recently established with an adequate endowment the American Law Institute, having for its purpose the restatement and the improvement of the body of our law. It is the greatest work of reform ever undertaken in our country and perhaps in any other country. That we have been forced to inaugurate this work is neither discouraging nor does it imply that we have drifted far from our legal moorings. As Sir Henry Maine strikingly said: Except in a small section of the world there has been nothing like the gradual amelioration of a legal system. There has been a material civilization, but, instead of the civilization expanding the law, the law has limited the civilization."

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You have made time-honored rules of procedure yield more than we to changed conditions. But you

have also shown that the adjustment of the common law and its procedure to new conditions, does not come automatically or by gradual development. It requires constant vigilance and effort. That is a lesson of your efforts in law reform which the American bar may well take account of, and if as a result of our significant visit to your country we may introduce similar reforms into American jurisprudence and judicial procedure, and may commend to the bar and the people of America such improvements as being still consistent with a proper development of the common law, our visit to your country will have served a useful purpose; and to that end I feel assured that each member of the American Bar Association will return to America and as a missionary will spread abroad the idea that not in its technicalities, not in its erudite conceptions and in its pristine obscurities and mysteries, lie the merits of the common law, but rather in the simplicity of its principles when applied to rights and wrongs, the promptness of its administration and its readiness to adjust itself to changing conditions.

You in England have seen defects due to anachronisms and defects which have been the growth of centuries. Our troubles have come from crudities and experiments incident to a growing civilization in a new and undeveloped country. We never fail to extol the common law, and yet it "has limited our civilization." For it is a curious fact that while we introduce innovations by statute, sometimes ill-considered and hastily enacted, we still make a fetish of some of the features of the common law, especially those which are procedural, and which even in England you have long since abandoned.

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