Principles of Political Economy

by Arthur Latham Perry

(b) Lawyers do not meet such a universal Demand in the nature of things as do physicians. Said Jonathan Smith of Lanesborough in the Massachusetts Convention of 1788: "We have no lawyer in our town, and we do well enough without." Still, one hundred years after that time there were about 70,000 lawyers in the United States, and Lanesborough itself had had in the meantime at least three distinguished ones. The interests of property and of reputation, and the constitutional rights of individuals as over against the claims of Government, so far as these may be conserved through the agency of lawyers, are by no means so constant and imperative as are the interests of life and health. Yet lawyers are in legitimate request in all civilized countries. A Latin legal maxim announces the obvious truth: It is the interest of the Commonwealth that there should be an end of disputes and litigations. Beyond question courts and counsel are wholesome on the whole for the individual and for the commonwealth. But the extremely complicated and unsatisfactory condition of American Law at present, owing to the fact that we have a none too simple United States Law with its three grades of courts and judges, and considerably divergent bodies of Law in each of 42 States, and owing also to the fact that our law in general is drawn almost at random from two pretty distinct Sources, the Common Law of England and the Civil Law of Rome, multiplies the number of lawyers relatively to the population out of all proportion to such ratio in other countries, and tends to make the lawyers as a class too conservative of old and drawn-out processes to the extent of opposing obvious betterments and simplifications. Said David Dudley Field, President of the American Bar Association, in August, 1889, at Chicago: "So far as I am aware, there is no other country calling itself civilized where it takes so long to punish a criminal, and so many years to get a final decision between man and man. Truly we may say, that Justice passes through the land on leaden sandals. One of our most trustworthy journalists asserts that more murderers are hung by mobs every year than are executed in course of law. And yet we have, it is computed, nearly 70,000 lawyers in the country. The proportion of the legal element is, in France, 1:4762; in Germany, 1:6423; in the United States, 1:909. Now turn from the performers to the performance. It appears that the average length of a lawsuit varies very much in the different States; the greatest being about 6 years, and the least 1½. Very few States finish a litigation in this shorter period. Taking all these figures together, is it any wonder that a cynic should say that we American lawyers talk more and speed less than any other equal number of men known to history?"

Mr. Field then repeated his well-known argument for Codification, ascribing the law's delays to the chaotic condition of the law, and maintaining that it is the first duty of a government to bring the laws to the knowledge of the People. "You must, of course, be true to your clients and the courts, but you must also give speedy justice to your fellow-citizens, more speedy than you have yet given, and you must give them a chance to know their laws."

Owing to the immense difficulties in the way of any one person mastering the various branches of the law in this country, it is falling more and more into specialties, and lawyers are devoting themselves to some one of its many branches, the main division line being between "Law" and "Equity" technically so-called; and whenever one becomes eminent along any line, his compensation is apt to be very large owing at once to a large Demand and to a small Supply at that point, while the average compensation of the lawyers as a whole class is meagre enough, because there are too many of them, and the people have become very suspicious of the law's meshes and delays.

(c) The grounds for the unabating Demand in Christian countries for religious teachers and preachers, let us rather say, for spiritual guides, lie deep down in the nature of man. If there be one proposition about men more incontestable than another, it may be this, that men are made in the image of God, and that there is among men in general an irrepressible striving to maintain and deepen this image. The touch between man and man and between man and God is such at this point, that men can help each other in this striving, and that they feel that they can help each other. This is the chief reason why some men are constantly consecrating themselves to the Christian ministry, and other men as constantly soliciting these to become their pastors and teachers. Those more enlightened in divine things and more spiritually minded offer themselves, as it were, not commercially but morally, to the unenlightened and less advanced as guides and helpers. It is, as it was with Wolfe and his men at the Heights of Abraham: those who got first to the top tarried a little to help those up who came after. And the most striking thing about it is, that the masses of men at bottom are as desirous to be uplifted as the choicer spirits among them are desirous to help the work forward. Ministers are still, and always will be (human nature is unchangeable), eagerly called; chapels and churches and cathedrals are still going up all over the earth; worship and petition and aspiration are ever ascending on the great world's altar stairs towards heaven, guided and inflamed by the chosen and choosing men of God,—"when priests on grand cathedral altars praise!"[5]

It is a monstrous perversion of language to maintain, that a clergyman in rendering such services as these is selling his religion. It is true, that he is selling under Demand services to the appropriate rendering of which his own personal piety contributes one large element, and thorough confidence in him on the part of his people as a good and earnest man contributes another large element; but the piety and the spiritual power and the worthy example are not nourished for the sake of selling the services, but for their own sake in personal worth and worthiness, and these things must not be confounded with the services that are sold. Accordingly, while the clergyman's vocation is sacred, and belongs to the sphere of religion, his salary belongs to the sphere of exchange, and its determination, in harmony of course with the higher impulses, is a business transaction. This distinction ought to be better understood than it is; and both clergymen and people need to be reminded that the spiritual things belong to one sphere, and the temporal things to another. The amount of a minister's salary, and the time and mode of its payment, are matters of pure business; and the minister himself is to be blamed if he does not attend to them, and insist on them, on business principles.

In the professions generally, and particularly in the ministerial profession, while, if we confine our attention to those persons who both have the requisite gifts of Nature and have been also thoroughly trained, we shall find a high rate of compensation on the two grounds of a strong Demand and a limited Supply, we must bear in mind too the counter-working influences which tend to increase the competition and thus decrease the compensation, namely, the respectability which attends them, the desire of knowledge for its own sake which is gained in connection with them, the instruction wholly or in part gratuitously offered to those in course of preparation for them, and the desire to do good without regard to pecuniary reward which actuates many who enter upon them.

(d) Physicians and lawyers and clergymen serve primarily individuals, or at most relatively small groups of individuals, and of course look for their pay to those whom they have served. It is different with Statesmen, the fourth class of professional laborers that we need to look at in an economic view. Statesmen worthy of the name serve at least a whole nation, and to the nation as such must they turn for their pecuniary rewards. And such men have never turned in vain to those whom they have benefited as a whole. Bismarck is the best modern instance of a Statesman, who has received from a grateful country immense money-measured remunerations for immense political services rendered. The Demand for the services of Statesmen rests in the deep consciousness of men organized politically into a Nation, that they need, especially in trying times, a Man of the highest natural gifts, and of the broadest attainments and of the loftiest political integrity to plan and act for them in emergencies, as they are conscious that they cannot plan and act for themselves organically. This does not mean, that the one ever knows essentials better than the many: he does not. This does not mean, that the true objective of a nation's march is ever discerned more clearly, or rather felt after more eagerly, by one man than by the many men concerned: it is not. Still less does it mean "a man on horseback." But it does mean this: a Nation (as the very name implies) is made up of the thoughts and hopes and throbbings and dim forecastings and half-formed purposes of multitudes constituting a unit (born together for one destiny on earth); and the true Statesman is one of themselves, sharing with them at once the traditions of the past and the perspectives of the future; one, with the instinct and the intellect to gather up and embody the general feeling and the general will; one, who has gained in some way the confidence of the masses who are willing for the time being to entrust to him the guidance of their affairs, and to empower him to plan and act for them as their champion and deliverer; and one, who (because he is one) can better seize the propitious moments for declaration and negotiation and public action, yet who never forgets that he is nothing but an agent for others, and is as ready to lay down responsibility at the public will as to assume it at the public will.

Washington was such a statesman, and Lincoln. Even Bismarck, under monarchical and later imperial environment, disclaims anything substantive and original in his own action: he did what he could not help doing: he followed the instincts of Prussia, and his own; and became the means of fulfilling as they gradually ripened the longings of the other German people for unity and order. Such a statesman was Chatham in England, and Cavour in Italy. Now, such services as these, done for a whole people, always deserve and usually receive, though not expressly bargained for beforehand, yet implied in the public devotion of one party and the general consensus of the other, extraordinary honors and emoluments. This is right, even on purely Economic principles. The services of great statesmen to their country in great epochs and emergencies are at once a gift and a sale, they are both patriotic and economic, there is equally a national Demand for them and a grateful recognition of them, the Supply is always exceedingly rare and the reward often exceedingly great; and it is to be put down to the lasting credit of the science of Economics, that its peculiar motives and results may mingle in and harmonize with the motives and results of the higher moral impulses, such as those of Patriotism and Religion, as in the cases of the Soldier and Statesman and Clergyman. There was no rational ground for the hesitation of Garibaldi to receive from the Parliament of Italy in 1875 an annual pension of 50,000 lire.

(e) There is a single class more of Professional laborers, loosely so-named, which should be noted before we dismiss the subject of Demand for laborers to pass to consider the Supply of them, namely, Literators and Artists and Actors of the highest rank. Statesmen primarily serve the individual nation that selects and rewards them, though their influence may indirectly uplift other nations also; but the great Writers and Painters and Actors, whatever may be their local habitation and name at first, soon come to belong to the world at large and to derive their revenue from many lands, because the highest Art is cosmopolitan in its own nature, and the best characterization of men as such cannot but be the property of Mankind. Shakspeare is no longer English, nor Angelo Italian, nor Mozart German, nor even Bernhardt French. Deep as are the scars and the sea that separate nation from nation, there is something deeper still in the innate recognition by man of man as depicted by the great Masters in immortal lines. There is, accordingly, a sort of Demand in the inmost soul of Humanity as such for these living and lofty touches and delineations of itself, whencesoever they may come. There is not indeed nor can there be, as in most other cases of sale, a bargain made beforehand between these preordained sellers of the rarest services and their silent yet waiting purchasers, yet there is after all an antecedent and an assured understanding between them. They are in touch even across the sea. The master strikes his chord, and the audience, fit, though few and scattered, listens and applauds and makes return.

Is the principle of "International Copyright," so-called, correct? Let us look narrowly before we pronounce. At present this good country of ours makes itself a mocking and a by-word even to its own intelligent and art-loving citizens by putting a tariff-tax of 30% on paintings and statuary by foreign artists, not at all to get revenue thereby, but to "protect" domestic artists in their inferior work by artificially lifting the price of their wares. So far is carried this jealousy of foreign works of art, that when the artists generously loan them for exhibition on our national occasions, they are put under bonds not to sell them on this side without previously paying the tariff-tax, which is graciously intermitted during the Exposition. This is Restriction. This is Protectionism pure and simple. This is legally excluding the Better in order to give a forced currency to the Worse. Now, domestic Copyright restricts the sale of any book to one publisher in his interest and in that of the author. The book now in the reader's hand is thus copyrighted. This legal arrangement between authors and publishers and their public may be perhaps logically defended, it may even be for the public weal on the whole, though in many cases it doubtless raises the price of good books, which would have been published without any such artificial encouragement. The copyright, however, like all patent-rights also, soon expires by limitation of time, and the public thereafter have the unrestricted use of what is really their own.