ToARTHUR MALCOLM LATTERone of His Majesty’s Counsel
ToARTHUR MALCOLM LATTERone of His Majesty’s Counsel
PREFACE
Lawyers are supposed to be more interested in the past than in the future and to resent lay criticism. Yet most lawyers would find the contemplation of existing anomalies intolerable if there were no prospect of any future remedy, and so far as lay criticism is concerned, it is almost invariably the lawyers who want reforms and are hopelessly obstructed by stupidity and indolence in the House of Commons. If the laity were really interested in legal reform the world would be a happier place.
In the last twenty years I have come across a large number of judges, barristers, and solicitors who have spent endless time and trouble in trying to improve our marriage and divorce laws without receiving any aid or gratitude from the public, and even an incomparable jurist and versatile scholar like Sir Frederick Pollock has never spared any effort to remove hardship with which he may not have been brought so closely in contact as less learned men.
I mention all this because my motive in writing the following remarks is to stimulate the interest of the laity in the law. The law offers a fine intellectual discipline and moral training to its students. Its standard of honesty is far higher than the ordinary commercialstandard and it teaches men and women how to think, as distinct from cramming miscellaneous facts into their heads without any guiding principle. Medieval men and women who had any education at all were far better educated than the newspaper reader of to-day. They were often bilingual and usually understood theology, if not law, and therefore comprehended logic and the rules of reasoning far better than the ordinary voter of our own time.
Professor Jowett once said that logic was “neither a science nor an art but a dodge,” and that is rather the attitude of the man in the street to law. I hope that any reader of this book who may be induced to look into some of the points I have mentioned will feel thisattitude to be as Philistine and unworthy as Jowett’s other observation that “Ici on parle français” was the real inscription over the gates of Hell.