hose of us who have been fortunate in having an education
permeated with an atmosphere of common sense, and an idea of how to
deal with human nature as it is, realize that the world is not to be
reformed tomorrow or in a month or a year or in a century, but that
progress is to be made slowly and that the problems before us are not so
widely different from those which were presented to our ancestors as far
back as the Christian era. Nor can we fail to derive some benefit from a
consideration of such troubles, tribulations and triumphs of our
profession in the past as suggest rules of conduct for lawyers in the
future. I do not mean that we are not to aspire for better things. Nor
do I wish to deny us the happiness of hope for reasonable and real
progress toward higher ideals. I simply insist that we ought not to
ignore the lessons of experience when we deal with conditions as they
are and as everybody who is familiar with them knows them to be.

The three civilizations in which we may most profitably study the growth
and development of the legal profession are the Jewish, the Roman and
the English. Among the Jews, the Mosaic law, which went into the
smallest details of personal life, was the guide to their rule of
action. As it had religious sanction, the high priests became the actual
ministers of justice and the preservation of religion and law was united
in them. Acting as their assistants, and as assessors in the tribunals
of which the high priests were the head, were the Scribes. They were
learned in the law; had a religious and priestly character themselves;
interpreted the Mosaic law with a view to its application to the various
facts and issues which arose; and were in addition the teachers of law.
It was to them that the rabbinical injunction was made "to make the
knowledge of the law neither a crown wherewith to make a show, nor a
spade wherewith to dig." And again it was said, "He who uses the crown
of the law for external aims fades away."

In describing the principles of non-remuneration to the Scribes, the
learned German Professor Schurer says: "In Christ's censures of the
Scribes and Pharisees, their covetousness is a special object of
reproof. Hence, even if their instruction was given gratuitously, they
certainly knew how to compensate themselves in some other way." And it
is because of this evasion of this rule that we find those passages in
the eleventh chapter of Luke, the 46th and 52d verses, which r