Executive Power 37

IV. The Signs of the Times 65

V. More Signs of the Times 83

CHAPTER I

HISTORY OF THE PROFESSION OF LAW

It is not too much to say that the profession of the law is more or less
on trial. It is certain that there is a crisis in the life of our
courts, and that a great political issue is being forced upon the
people, for they must decide whether the courts are to continue to
exercise the power they now have, and what character of service they
shall be required to render. Judges are lawyers. They ought to be
trained practitioners and learned in the profession of the law before
they ascend the Bench, and generally they are. Therefore, our courts, as
they are now conducted, and our profession, which is the handmaid of
justice, are necessarily so bound together in our judicial system that
an attack upon the courts is an attack upon our profession, and an
attack upon our profession is equally an attack upon the courts.

We have all noted on the stage and in the current literature the
flippant and sarcastic references to the failures of the administration
of justice, and we are familiar with the sometimes insidious and too
often open impeachments of the courts, which appear in the press and
upon the hustings. They are charged with failure to do justice, with bad
faith, with lack of intelligent sympathy for socially progressive
movements, with a rigid and reactionary obstruction to the movement
toward greater equality of condition, and with a hidebound and
unnecessarily sensitive attitude of mind in respect to the rights of
property. One count that looms large in the wide range of the indictment
against our judicial system is the immoral part that lawyers are said
necessarily to play in the perversion of justice by making the worse
appear the better reason. Such a public agitation and such an issue in
politics lead to a consideration of the fundamental reasons for the
existence of our profession in the past, and a further inquiry as to the
need for it in the future, as preliminary to a discussion of the rules
of conduct that should govern its practice.

There are those who intimate that we can learn nothing from the past.
They don't say so in so many words, but they proceed on the theory that
man, under the elevating influences with which they propose to surround
him, is suddenly to become a different creature, prompted by different
motives. But t