I am writing here now chiefly of the Western Allies.  Russia is peculiar in having her administrative machine much more highly developed in relation to her general national life than the free democratic countries.  She has to make a bureaucracy that has not hitherto been an example for efficiency into a bureaucracy that will be constructive, responsive, liberal, scientific, and efficient; the Western countries have to do the same with that oligarchy of politicians which, as Professor Michels has recently pointed out in his striking book on “Political Parties,” is the necessary reality of democratic government.  By different methods the Eastern and Western Powers have to attain a common end.  Both bureaucracy and pseudo-democratic oligarchy have to accomplish an identical task, to cement the pacific alliance of the Pledged Allies and to socialise their common industrial and economic life, so as to make it invulnerable to foreign attack.

Now in Great Britain, which is the democracy that has been most under the close observation of the present prophet, there is at present a great outcry against the “politician,” and more particularly against the “lawyer-politician.”  He is our embarrassment.  In him we personify all our difficulties.  Let us consider the charges against this individual.  Let us ask, can we do without him?  And let us further see what chances there may be of so altering, qualifying, or balancing him as to minimise the evil of his influence.  To begin with, let us run over the essentials of the charge against him.

It is with a modest blush that the present prophet recapitulates these charges.  So early as the year 1902 he was lifting up his voice, not exactly in the wilderness but at least in the Royal Institution, against the legal as compared with the creative or futurist type of mind.  The legal mind, he insisted, looks necessarily to the past.  It is dilatory because it has no sense of coming things, it is uninventive and wasteful, it does not create, it takes advantage.  It is the type of mind least able, under any circumstances, to organise great businesses, to plan campaigns, to adventure or achieve.  “Wait and see” crystallises its spirit.  Its resistance is admirable, and it has no “go.”  Nevertheless there is a tendency for power to gravitate in all democratic countries to the lawyer.

In the British system the normal faults of the lawyer are enhanced, and his predominance intensified, by certain peculiarities of our system.  In the first place, he belongs to a guild of exceptional power.  In Britain it happens that the unfortunate course was taken ages ago of bribing the whole legal profession to be honest.  The British judges and law officers are stupendously overpaid in order to make them incorruptible; it is a poor but perhaps a well-merited compliment to their professional code.  We have squared the whole profession to be individually unbribable.