Crossing the Strand from Temple to Court
His success, however, means much, for there lie before him great pecuniary rewards, fame, perhaps a judgeship, or possibly an attorney-generalship, both of which, unlike their prototypes in America, mean very high compensation, to say nothing of the honor and the title which usually accompany such offices.
The English Bar is small and the business very concentrated, but no statistics are available, for many are called who never practice. By considering the estimates of well-informed judges, barristers and solicitors, it seems that the legal business of the Kingdom is handled by so small a number as from 500 to 800 barristers, although the roll of living men who have been called to the Bar now includes 9,970 names.
We have no Bar with which to institute a comparison, for each county of every State has its own and all members of county Bars, practicing in the appellate court of a State, constitute the Bar of that State, which is a complete entity. Great commercial centres have larger ones and have more business than rural localities, but no Bar in America is national like that of London.
It would be interesting, if it were possible, to compare the proportion of the population of England, which pursues the law as a vocation, with that of the United States, but no figures exist for the purpose. The number of barristers includes, as already stated, those who do not practice, while an enumeration of the solicitors' offices would exclude individual solicitors employed by others, as will be explained hereafter. The aggregate of these two uncertain elements, however, would be about 27,000. The legal directories give the names of something like 95,000 lawyers in America of whom about 27,000 appear in fifteen large cities—New York, for example, being credited with over 10,000, Chicago with over 3,500 and San Francisco with about 1,500—leaving about 69,000 in the smaller towns and scattered throughout the land. These tentative, and necessarily vague, suggestions rather indicate that the proportion of lawyers may not be very unequal in the two countries.