Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 edition. Excerpt: ... POSTSCRIPT. The following observations, which I think well worthy the student's perusal, are from The Irish Law Times and Solicitors' Journal, of Saturday, January 10th, 1880, in its review of the second edition of this work: -- "Sir Thomas More, indeed, makes the absence of advocates one of the characteristic features of his 'Utopia, ' saying that the inhabitants ' consider them a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters as well as wrest laws; and therefore they think it much better that every man should plead his own cause and trust it to the judge.' But it would be Utopian in the extreme to suppose that the institution of advocacy can ever become extinct in the world as it is. 'No change, practical or speculative, social, political, or economic, has any terrors for the profession of the law, ' are the words of Mr. Gladstone, and rightly did he hold it unlikely to be 'displaced or menaced by any of the mutations of this or a future century' (see 13 Ir. L. T. & S. J. 616, and compare 9 id. 349). Addressing the younger members of the French bar, the great chancellor of Louis XV. said, 'the most deep-seated, and perhaps most incurable, disease of your profession is the blind temerity with which men venture to engage in it without having rendered themselves worthy of it by long and laborious preparation;' and with equal truth his words might have been addressed to the bar of our own time and country. Not that preparation is altogether absent so far as regards the study of the law itself, but, that preparation, so far as regards the particular functions of advocacy, there is virtually none--a circumstance which seems in no degree to abate the overweening confidence of the advocate, although, as our author sensibly observes, '...
