A TRIBUTE TO THE LEGAL PROFESSION.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17105, 29 March 1921, Page 10

A TRIBUTE TO THE LEGAL PROFESSION.

(fROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) LONDON, February 10. Lord Reading, speaking at the Solicitors' Company dinner:— "The legal profession in itself is very crowded, and yet, after all, it is a great field for activity for men of intellect. It gives them the opportunity to use their powers and develop their capacities. It is a constant training ground. Men who are in it are learning day by day, and that has always been to me one of its great attractions. It touches life at every point. Any man who goes through his career as a lawyer in either branch learns a great deal of human nature. The branch of the profession to which I belong has. I believe, a rather- unfair share of the Erizes of tihe profession. But it also aa some consolation for the other branch in observing that the struggling man at the Bar would be much better off were he a solicitor, for the reason that there are much better opportunities for the young solicitor who is earning his living than the man who goes to the Bar. Life on the Bench ib a little isolated. But it has one supreme advantage, which I think is the consolation of all men who pass from the Bar to the Bench, and who then feel that they would like sometimes to go back and fight a-case; it is the one supreme consolation that the man who is sitting on the Bench has absolutely one duty only to discharge, and that is to do right according to the evidence. (Cheers.) The Bar is a great and glorious profession. It has one great quality, that it takes men for what they are; it accepts nothing for granted; it J'udges men according to their merit, t has a high standard of honour, and there is no profession in the world in which any deflection from that standard is more quickly recognised and more appreciably felt than m the legal profession, and'l am speaking not only'for the Bar but for both branches. I am reminded "that I am passing from the profession to another sphere of activity, where there are great responsibilities—what position is worth having if it does not. carry any responsibility?—full of difficulty, no doubt—again, that does not matter anything. When I leave this country and go to India to discharge my duties there, I go immensely encouraged by the support that I have received from so many friends and from so many from whom I least expected it. I can only fcope and pray that 1 may be able to render some small pari of the service which I go prepared to give and am anxious to render." (Cheers.)