The great statesman has to prove himself a great statesman just as the great grocer has to prove himself a great grocer.  He has to prove it by the qualities of statesmanship exercised in the full glare of publicity.  If the grocer makes a howler in his trade the world knows nothing about it.  If the statesman makes a howler all the world knows about it.  He has to emerge to the front in the most public of all battles, and you may be sure that no one comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of the fiercest trials.  He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer.  Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to survive it.  No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, “Yah! nailmaker,” or to Mr. Balfour, “Yah! landlord,” thinking he had disposed of them.  Why should you suppose that when you have said “Yah! lawyer” to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd George you have disposed of them?

Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people—­brewers, or soap boilers, or bankers?  I doubt it.  They are just the average, and include good and bad like any other class.  Judge Jeffreys was a monster; but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who largely saved the liberties of this country.  I doubt whether the world has ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln.  And he was a lawyer.  I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made.  He had a practice at the Bar which, I believe, brought him in L10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought him more than L5000.  He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable seat on the Woolsack and L10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman.  Ah, you say, but look at the glory.  Well, look at it.  I would, as Danton said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of men.  It is the most ungrateful calling on earth.  And, whatever other defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing as glory is not one of them.  You will discover more passion for glory in Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five years.  And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.

But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis.  It is an old dislike.  You remember that remark of Johnson’s when he was asked on a certain occasion who was the man who had left the room:  “I don’t like saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; but I believe he is an attorney." And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a barrister as “a loaded blunderbuss “—­if you bought him he blew your opponent’s brains