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The English Bar is a society of advocates, though, as Blackstone tells us, we generally call them counsel. The Scots retain the name in their Faculty of Advocates. The word must be insisted upon for its ancientry and meaning. The order of advocates is, in D’Aguesseau’s famous phrase, “as noble as virtue.” Far back in the Capitularies of Charlemagne it was ordained of the profession of advocates “that nobody should be admitted therein but men mild, pacific, fearing God, and loving justice, upon pain of elimination.” So may it continue, world without end.

From the earliest, Englishmen have understood that advocacy is necessary to justice, and honesty is essential to advocacy. The thirteenth century Mirrour of Justices may, as modern jurists hold, be a contemptible legal compilation. It is said to have been written by one Andrew Horn, a fishmonger; and what could he have known, say the learned ones, about the origin and history of legal affairs? Nevertheless, to the reader of to-day the views of the man in the street, the common citizen of a bygone age, about the place in the world of the advocate is more precious than many black-letter folios of crabbed juridical learning.