30 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. lawyer who knows only vaguely where the criminal courts are held. There are of course a very few notable exceptions to this. But, as a rule, a leading lawyer in civil practice as little thinks of defend- ing a criminal as he thinks of filling the pulpit on Sunday in one of our large churches. Several men of high rank at the bar as trial lawyers have lately gone into the criminal courts on emergencies. In one instance the experimenter, as soon as his task was done, fell seriously ill. In others the distinguished novices admitted having been nervous and sleepless, and professed a distaste, if not an incapacity, for that branch of law. Bad as all of our court-rooms usually are, the criminal courts till justnow have been somuch worse that a strong stomach seemed a sme qua non for practising in them. Ttie entire bar now depends on the great libraries in the city for research. No law office pretends to have all the books it may need. The older lawyers have libraries too extensive to dis- card, and not full enough to be a sole dependence. The younger lawyers supply themselves simply with a few books on local prac- tice, and digests of local reports. Many local lawyers persist in the fallacy that law is not a busi- ness ; that the profession must not become commercialized. Some such even refuse to have bill-heads, lest the law might thus be assimilated to mere ship-chandlery. Obviously there are othei- and better means than this of substantiating the dignity of the profession, and until these lawyers dispense with bills as well as bill-heads their humbug will be too plain to be harmful. The philosophic lawyer haunts the studious cloister, and is intrinsically not a money-getter. In the long run, even in New York City, he is indispensable to the correct practice of the law, even by a money-getting firm. To every member of our local bar the might of the dollar is steadily, often painfully, present. Adam Smith declared that, " if lawyers were not paid, they would do even worse work than they do now." But as he reasoned a priori^ the profession need not take his slur too much to heart, but may depend on the frank authority of one schooled by local experience. Such a member of our local bar, who had served professionally, but only incidentally, in procuring the franchise for running cars on Broadway, and who has also filled a judgeship in an important local court, declared under oath before our Senate Investigating Committee that it is impossible to practise law here "on wind." The discrimination of the witness between what is and what is not wind was justified by a charge of fifty thousand dollars.
