VI

THE ENGLISH BAR1

MR. ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND GENTLEMEN OF THE BAR-You do not need to be assured that no compliment could be more grateful to me, or to any man who, like myself, has been for more than thirty years a member of the English Bar, than such a welcome as has been given to me to-night by the members of the great profession, among whom the laborious days of my life have been so largely spent. It enhances to me the value of that compliment that you should have selected as your mouthpiece my learned friend, Sir Edward Clarke. It has been my misfortune both in political and in professional life to be more often against than with Sir Edward Clarke; but whether with him or against him I have always felt and which of us has not ?-that there is no one among our contemporaries whom I should more heartily advise a young man entering the professional arena to look to as model, whether of temper, of method, of style, or of the

1 Delivered at the Inner Temple Hall, July 10, 1908.

whole art of advocacy. Courage which, though always undaunted, never blusters; persuasiveness which seems rather to win than to capture assent; eloquence which never sacrifices light to heat, those are qualities of which no man at the Bar in my time has been a more perfect and consummate exponent. Mr. Attorney, this is a gathering of the Bar, and of the Bar alone; and almost for the first time (for it does not happen frequently in our lives) we are able to talk without turning our eyes, or directing our attention, either to the Bench above or to the Well below. To me I must confess that to speak anywhere in the region of the Temple without a tribunal, without a client, without a brief, and, I must add, without a fee, is an unfamiliar and in some ways a nerveshaking experience. I can only wish that I were imbued for the moment with some portion of the magnificent sang-froid of that accomplished advocate Sir Richard Bethell, who is said -I daresay some of you know the legend-in the midst of a super-subtle argument, when harassed by the interlocutory irrelevance of a Chancery Judge, to have turned round to his unhappy junior, and to have exclaimed in an audible aside, The damned fool has taken your point."

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Well, gentlemen, as I am among old friends and brethren, I may, perhaps, be allowed for a moment-and only for a moment-to be egotistic and autobiographical. Let me, then, seize the

opportunity and I am glad to have it-of recalling the names and the memories of two illustrious lawyers to whom I feel myself always under special obligation. The first is my old master, Charles Bowen, afterwards one of the brightest ornaments of our Bench, in whose chambers not far from here, in Brick Court, I served my pupilage. I learnt, I hope, many things there, and amongst the other lessons which I learnt was one which every man who aspires to practise with success at the Bar in these days has to learn sooner or later, and that was the dangers, the multiform and manifold dangers, of an encounter with Danckwerts. Later on, after some pretty lean years, in which one used to welcome as an unexpected and grateful phenomenon a County Court brief, marked one guinea, and coming from a client whose time and method of payment were both nebulous and problematical, I had the singular good-fortune of securing the favour and help of a great man, my dear and revered friend, Lord James of Hereford. I owe to him a debt which he has never thought of exacting, and which I can never repay. May I add to those a third name-the name of one whom, I think, all the older men among us will agree with me in placing in the very first and highest rank of the advocates, either of our own or of any other time, Charles Russell? I was privileged, as Sir Edward Clarke has reminded me, to be

associated with him as his junior in the greatest State trial of the Victorian era. We had as colleagues my noble friend the present Lord Chancellor, and a man of infinite humour and of unique lovableness, whose untimely death was to me and to all his friends an irreparable loss -the late Frank Lockwood. Mr. Attorney and gentlemen, those are memories which time can never efface. Sir Edward Clarke has referred to the fact that it is just about one hundred years since a practising member of the Bar was last Prime Minister of England. He was kind enough not to remind me that that predecessor came to a sudden and untimely end. Absit omen! But every age has its own peculiar dangers. It has been suggested to me by what Sir Edward Clarke has said, that in our schooldays we all read of a certain legendary character, who seems to have tried to deal with a feminist movement somewhere in Thrace by euphonious generalities, and he, as a result, was torn to pieces by wild women. History, happily, does not always, or even often, repeat itself.

It is natural, perhaps, that on an occasion like this one should be tempted to reflect upon the relations in our history between politics and the law. The " gentlemen of the long robe," of the "nisi prius mind," have provided from time to time ample material for the cheap sarcasms of superficial and uninstructed politicians. Once,

at any rate, and I think only once, in our history they were able to put these prejudices into practice, and the disastrous experiment was tried of a House of Commons from which all lawyers were excluded. What was the result? That notorious body, pilloried in our history as the Parliamentum indoctum, of which Lord Coke, not perhaps an altogether impartial judge, declares that the whole of its legislation was not worth twopence. Gentlemen, I make this claim, that there is no class or profession in our community which has done more-I will go further, I will say that there is none which has done as much—to define, to develop, and to defend the liberties of England. Sir Thomas More, Lord Coke himself, Selden, Somers, Camden, Romilly - those are but a few of the names selected almost at random from a long and illustrious roll. They were all bred in the common law of England, which is not a compendium of mechanical rules written in fixed and indelible characters, but a living organism, which has grown and moved in response to the larger and fuller development of the nation. The common law of England has been, still is, and will continue to be, both here and wherever English communities are found, at once the organ and the safeguard of English justice and English freedom.

There is another aspect of our meeting to