but through the private practice
of advocacy. The higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain,
produces under the stimulus of these conditions an advocate as its
finest flower. To go from the posing and chatter of the Union Debating
Society to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce ambition.
Few men of exceptional energy will do that.

The national consequences of this state of affairs have been only too
manifest throughout the conduct of the war. The British Government has
developed all the strength and all the weakness of the great profession
it represents. It has been uninventive, dilatory, and without
initiative; it has been wasteful and evasive; but it has not been
wanting in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been wary and shrewd,
and it has held on to office with the concentrated skill and
determination of a sucker-fish. And the British mind, with a
concentration and intensity unprecedented before the war, is speculating
how it can contrive to get a different sort of ruler and administrator
at work upon its affairs.

There is a disposition in the Press, and much of the private talk one
hears, to get rid of lawyers from the control of national affairs
altogether, to substitute "business men" or scientific men or "experts."
That way lies dictatorship and Caesarism. And even Great Britain is not
so heedless of the experiences of other nations as to attempt again what
has already been so abundantly worked out in national disaster across
the Channel. The essential business of government is to deal between man
and man; it is not to manage the national affairs in detail, but to
secure the proper managers, investigators, administrators, generals,
and so forth, to maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance between
them. We cannot do without a special class of men for these
interventions and controls. In other words, we cannot do without a
special class of politicians. They may be elected by a public or
appointed by an autocrat; at some point they have to come in. And this
business of intervening between men and classes and departments in
public life, and getting them to work together, is so closely akin to
the proper work of a lawyer in dealing between men and men, that, unless
the latter are absolutely barred from becoming the former, it is almost
unavoidable that politicians should be drawn more abundantly from the
lawyer class than from any other class in the community.

This is so much