What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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The burthen of this class upon the community will not be relatively
quite so heavy as it would otherwise have been, because of a very
considerable rise in wages and prices.

In a community in which all the great initiatives have been assumed by
the State, the importance of financiers and promoters will have
diminished relatively to the importance of administrative officials; the
opportunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have so diminished
that there will probably be far less evidence of great concentrations of
private wealth in the European social landscape than there was before
the war.

On the other hand, there will be an enormously increased _rentier_ class
drawing the interest of the war loans from the community, and
maintaining a generally high standard of comfort. There will have been a
great demand for administrative and technical abilities and a great
stimulation of scientific and technical education. By 1926 we shall be
going about a world that will have recovered very largely from the
impoverishment of the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured
automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped
with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn
we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised
industry--and paying off the National Debt simultaneously, and reducing
our burden of _rentiers_.

At the same time our boys will be studying science in their schools
more thoroughly than they do now, and they will in many cases be
learning Russian instead of Greek or German. More of our boys will be
going into the public service, and fewer thinking of private business,
and they will be going into the public service, not as clerks, but as
engineers, technical chemists, manufacturers, State agriculturists, and
the like. The public service will be less a service of clerks and more a
service of practical men. The ties that bind France and Great Britain at
the present moment will have been drawn very much closer. France,
Belgium and England will be drifting towards a French-English
bi-lingualism....

So much of our picture we may splash in now. Much that is quite
essential remains to be discussed. So far we have said scarcely a word
about the prospects of party politics and the problems of government
that arise as the State ceases to be a mere impartial adjudicator
between private individuals, and takes upon itself more and more of the
direction of the general life of the community.

VI. LAWYER AND PRESS

The riddle of administration is the most subtle of all those that the
would-be prophet of the things that are coming must attempt. We see the
great modern States confronted now by vast and urgent necessities, by
opportunities that may never recur. Individualism has achieved its
inevitable failure; "go as you please" in a world that also contained
aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised
State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency
arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself
together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great
system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in
some better terms than "go as you please," or fail.

And we find the affairs of nearly every great democratic State in the
hands of a class of men not specially adapted to any such constructive
or administrative work.

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.

The judges, moreover, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are appointed from
among the leading barristers, an arrangement that a child can see is
demoralising and inadvisable. And in Great Britain all the greatest
salaries in the government service are reserved for the legal
profession. The greatest prizes, therefore, before an energetic young
man who has to make his way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and
his line of advancement to these lies, for all the best years of his
life, not through the public service, but through the private practice
of advocacy. The higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain,
produces under the stimulus of these conditions an advocate as its
finest flower. To go from the posing and chatter of the Union Debating
Society to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce ambition.
Few men of exceptional energy will do that.

The national consequences of this state of affairs have been only too
manifest throughout the conduct of the war. The British Government has
developed all the strength and all the weakness of the great profession
it represents. It has been uninventive, dilatory, and without
initiative; it has been wasteful and evasive; but it has not been
wanting in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been wary and shrewd,
and it has held on to office with the concentrated skill and
determination of a sucker-fish. And the British mind, with a
concentration and intensity unprecedented before the war, is speculating
how it can contrive to get a different sort of ruler and administrator
at work upon its affairs.

There is a disposition in the Press, and much of the private talk one
hears, to get rid of lawyers from the control of national affairs
altogether, to substitute "business men" or scientific men or "experts."
That way lies dictatorship and Caesarism. And even Great Britain is not
so heedless of the experiences of other nations as to attempt again what
has already been so abundantly worked out in national disaster across
the Channel. The essential business of government is to deal between man
and man; it is not to manage the national affairs in detail, but to
secure the proper managers, investigators, administrators, generals,
and so forth, to maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance between
them. We cannot do without a special class of men for these
interventions and controls. In other words, we cannot do without a
special class of politicians. They may be elected by a public or
appointed by an autocrat; at some point they have to come in. And this
business of intervening between men and classes and departments in
public life, and getting them to work together, is so closely akin to
the proper work of a lawyer in dealing between men and men, that, unless
the latter are absolutely barred from becoming the former, it is almost
unavoidable that politicians should be drawn more abundantly from the
lawyer class than from any other class in the community.

This is so much the case, that when the London _Times_ turns in despair
from a government of lawyers and looks about for an alternative, the
first figure that presents itself is that distinguished advocate Sir
Edward Carson!

But there is a difference between recognising that some sort of
lawyer-politician is unavoidable and agreeing that the existing type of
lawyer who is so largely accountable for the massive slowness, the
confused action, the slovenliness rather than the weakness of purpose,
shown by Great Britain in this war, is the only possible type, The
British system of education and legal organisation is not the last word
of human wisdom in these matters.

The real case we British have against our lawyers, if I may adopt an
expressive colloquialism, is not that they are lawyers, but that they
are such infernal lawyers. They trail into modern life most of the
faults of a mediaeval guild. They seem to have no sense of the State
they could develop, no sense of the future they might control. Their law
and procedure has never been remodelled upon the framework of modern
ideas; their minds are still set to the tune of mediaeval bickerings,
traditionalism, and State blindness. They are mystery dealers, almost
unanimously they have resisted giving the common man the protection of a
code.

In the United Kingdom we have had no Napoleon to override the
profession. It is extraordinary how complete has been their preservation
of barbaric conceptions. Even the doctor is now largely emancipated from
his archaic limitations as a skilled retainer. He thinks more and more
of the public health, and less and less of his patron. The more recent a
profession the less there is of the individualistic personal reference;
scientific research, for example, disavows and forbids every personal
reference.

But while everyone would be shocked at some great doctor, or some great
research institution, in these days of urgent necessity spending two or
three weeks on the minor ailments of some rich person's lapdog, nobody
is scandalised at the spectacle of Sir Edward Carson and a costly law
court spending long days upon the sordid disputes that centre upon young
Master Slingsby's ear--whether it is the Slingsby family ear or the ear
of a supposititious child--a question that any three old women might be
trusted to settle. After that he rests for a fortnight and recuperates,
and returns--to take up a will case turning upon the toy rabbits and
suchlike trifles which entertained the declining years of a
nonagenarian. This, when we are assured that the country awaits Sir
Edward as its Deliverer. It is as if Lord Kitchener took a month off to
act at specially high rates for the "movies." Our standard for the
lawyer is older and lower than it is for other men.

There is no more reason nowadays why a lawyer should look to advocacy as
a proper use of his knowledge than that a doctor should make private
poisoning the lucrative side of his profession. There is no reason why
a court of law should ignore the plain right of the commonweal to
intervene in every case between man and man. There is every reason why
trivial disputes about wills and legitimacy should not be wasting our
national resources at the present time, when nearly every other form of
waste is being restrained. The sound case against the legal profession
in Anglo-Saxon countries is not that it is unnecessary, but that it is
almost incredibly antiquated, almost incredibly careless of the public
well-being, and that it corrupts or dwarfs all the men who enter it.

Our urgent need is not so much to get rid of the lawyer from our affairs
as to get rid of the wig and gown spirit and of the special pleader, and
to find and develop the new lawyer, the lawyer who is not an advocate,
who is not afraid of a code, who has had some scientific education, and
whose imagination has been quickened by the realisation of life as
creative opportunity. We want to emancipate this profession from its
ancient guild restrictions--the most anti-social and disastrous of all
such restrictions--to destroy its disgraceful traditions of over-payment
and fee-snatching, to insist upon a scientific philosophical training
for its practitioners, to make the practice of advocacy a fall from
grace, and to bar professional advocates from the bench.

In the British trenches now there must be many hundreds of fine young
lawyers, still but little corrupted, who would be only too glad to
exchange the sordid vulgarities and essential dishonour of a successful
lawyer's career under the old conditions for lives of service and
statecraft....

No observer of the general trend of events in Europe will get any real
grasp of what is happening until he realises the cardinal importance of
the reactions that centre upon this question. The current development of
political institutions and the possible development of a new spirit and
method in the legal profession are so intimately interwoven as to be
practically one and the same question. The international question is,
can we get a new Germany? The national question everywhere is, can we
get a better politician?

The widely prevalent discontent with the part played by the lawyer in
the affairs of all the Western Allies is certain to develop into a
vigorous agitation for legal reconstruction. In the case of every other
great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions.
The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of
protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon unskilled labour, for
which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual
serfdom that the nation's needs might be supplied; the medical
profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the
front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in
any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry of Munitions is full of
unpaid workers, and so on.

The British legal profession and trade union alone has made no sign of
any disposition to relax its elaborate restrictions upon the labour of
amateurs and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its habitual
rewards. There has been no attempt to reduce the costly law officers of
the Government, for example, or to call in the help of older men or
women to release law officers who are of military experience or age.

And I must admit that there are small signs of the advent of the "new
lawyer," at whose possibility I have just flung a hopeful glance, to
replace the existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness. Barristers seem to
age prematurely--at least in Great Britain--unless they are born old. In
the legal profession one hears nothing of "the young"; one hears only of
"smart juniors." Reform and progressive criticism in the legal
profession, unlike all other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the
retired.

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only beginning to feel the real
stresses of the war; she is coming into the full strain a year behind
France, Germany, and Russia; and after the war there lies the
possibility of still more violent stresses; so that what is as yet a
mere cloud of criticism and resentment at our lawyer-politicians and
privileged legal profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 or
1919.

I am inclined to foretell as one most highly probable development of the
present vague but very considerable revolt against the lawyer in British
public life, first, some clumsy proposals or even attempts to leave him
out, and use "business men," soldiers, admirals, dictators, or men of
science, in his place--which is rather like throwing away a blottesque
fountain-pen and trying to write with a walking-stick or a revolver or a
flash-light--and then when that is found to be impossible, a resolute
attempt to clean and reconstitute the legal profession on modern and
more honourable lines; a movement into which, quite possibly, a number
of the younger British lawyers, so soon as they realise that the
movement is good enough to risk careers upon, may throw themselves. A
large share in such a reform movement, if it occurs, will be brought
about by the Press; by which I mean not simply the periodical Press, but
all books and contemporary discussion. It is only by the natural playing
off of Press against lawyer-politician that democratic States can ever
come to their own.

And that brings me to the second part of this question, which is
whether, quite apart from the possible reform and spiritual rebirth of
the legal profession, there is not also the possibility of balancing and
correcting its influence. In ancient Hebrew history--it may be a warning
rather than a precedent--there were two great forces, one formal,
conservative and corrupting, the other undisciplined, creative, and
destructive; the first was the priest, the second the prophet. Their
interaction is being extraordinarily paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon
democracies by the interaction of lawyer-politician and Press to-day.

If the lawyer-politician is unavoidable, the Press is indispensable. It
is not in the clash and manoeuvres and mutual correction of party, but
in the essential conflict of political authority on the one hand and
Press on the other that the future of democratic government apparently
lies. In the clearer, simpler case of France, a less wealthy and finer
type of lawyer interacts with a less impersonal Press. It is in the
great contrasts and the essential parallelism of the French and the
Anglo-Saxon democratic systems that one finds the best practical reason
for anticipating very profound changes in these two inevitables of
democracy, the Press and the lawyer-politician, and for assuming that
the method of democracy has still a vast range of experimental
adjustment between them still untried. Such experimental adjustment will
be the chief necessity and business of political life in every country
of the world for the next few decades.

The lawyer-politician and the Press are as it were the right and left
hands of a modern democracy. The war has brought this out clearly. It
has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once linked this and that
newspaper with this and that party. For years the Press of all the
Western democracies has been drifting slowly away from the tradition--it
lasted longest and was developed most completely in Great
Britain--that-newspapers were party organs.

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an ambiguously helpful
person who is asked out to dinner, who is even admitted to week-end
conferences, by the political great. He takes his orders from the Whig
peers or the Tory peers. At his greatest he advises them respectfully.
But that was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; that was
before modern democracy had begun to produce its characteristic
political forms. It is not so very much more than a century ago that
Great Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister. Through all the
Napoleonic wars she was still a country ruled by great feudal landlords,
and gentlemen adventurers associated with them. The lawyers only came to
their own at the close of the great Victorian duet of Disraeli and
Gladstone, the last of the political gentlemen adventurers. It is only
now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain
rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is.

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy. Illiberal
at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of
nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against
the holy alliance. In the figure of such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey
the old order mingles with the new. But most of his colleagues are of
the new order. They would have been incredible in the days of Lord
Melbourne. In its essential quality the present British Government is
far more closely akin to the French than it is to its predecessor of a
hundred years ago. Essentially it is a Government of lawyer-politicians
with no close family ties or intimate political traditions and
prejudices. And its natural and proper corrective is the Press, over
which it fails to exercise now even a shadow of the political and social
influence that once kept that power in subjection.

It is the way with all human institutions; they remain in appearance
long after they have passed away in reality. It is on record that the
Roman senate still thought Rome was a republic in the third century of
the Christian era. It is nothing wonderful, therefore, that people
suppose that the King, the Lords, and the Commons, debating through a
Ministry and an Opposition, still govern the British Empire. As a matter
of fact it is the lawyer-politicians, split by factions that simulate
the ancient government and opposition, who rule, under a steadily
growing pressure and checking by the Press. Since this war began the
Press has released itself almost inadvertently from its last association
with the dying conflicts of party politics, and has taken its place as a
distinct power in the realm, claiming to be more representative of the
people than their elected representatives, and more expressive of the
national mind and will.

Now there is considerable validity in this claim. It is easy to say
that a paper may be bought by any proprietor and set to put what he
chooses into the public mind. As a matter of fact, buying a newspaper is
far more costly and public a proceeding than buying a politician. And if
on the one hand the public has no control over what is printed in a
paper, it has on the other the very completest control over what is
read. A politician is checked by votes cast once in several years, a
newspaper is checked by sales that vary significantly from day to day. A
newspaper with no circulation is a newspaper that does not matter; a few
weeks will suffice to show if it has carried its public with it or gone
out of influence. It is absurd to speak of a newspaper as being less
responsible than a politician.

Nevertheless, the influence of a great newspaper is so much greater than
that of any politician, and its power more particularly for
mischief--for the creation of panic conditions, for example--so much
swifter, that it is open to question whether the Press is at present
sufficiently held to its enormous responsibilities.

Let us consider its weaknesses at the present time, let us ask what
changes in its circumstances are desirable in the public interest, and
what are likely to come about. We have already reckoned upon the Press
as a chief factor in the adequate criticism, cleansing, and
modernisation of the British lawyer-politician; is there any power to
which we may look for the security of the Press? And I submit the answer
is the Press. For while the legal profession is naturally homogeneous,
the Press is by nature heterogeneous. Dog does not eat dog, nor lawyer,
lawyer; but the newspapers are sharks and cannibals, they are in
perpetual conflict, the Press is a profession as open as the law is
closed; it has no anti-social guild feeling; it washes its dirty linen
in public by choice and necessity, and disdains all professional
etiquette. Few people know what criticisms of the Lord Chief Justice may
have ripened in the minds of Lord Halsbury or Sir Edward Carson, but we
all know, to a very considerable degree of accuracy, the worst of what
this great journalist or group of newspaper proprietors thinks of that.

We have, therefore, considerable reason for regarding the Press as
being, in contrast with the legal profession, a self-reforming body. In
the last decade there has been an enormous mass of criticism of the
Press by the Press. There has been a tendency to exaggerate its
irresponsibility. A better case is to be made against it for what I will
call, using the word in its least offensive sense, its venality. By
venality I mean the fact, a legacy from the now happily vanishing age of
individualism, that in theory and law at least anyone may own a
newspaper and sell it publicly or secretly to anyone, that its
circulation and advertisement receipts may be kept secret or not as the
proprietors choose, and that the proprietor is accountable to no one for
any exceptional incomings or any sudden fluctuations in policy.

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