The importance of the legal profession

Abstract

BEFORE I take up the subject I have chosen, allow me to offer you my congratulations for the creation of this Society which will give you an opportunity to study many important legal questions and to become familiar with the art of talking. This is indeed a real art because there are modes and modes in which one may deal with difficult cases; you now have a chance of getting used to talking in public- a thing which will prove of immense help when one day the gates of the University will have to stand ajar and behold you about to enter a much wider sphere: the legal profession. It will not be necessary for you then to start learning how to make public speeches, because this Society will, I hope, afford you a chance for training yourself in elocution. I, therefore, wish you every success and I hope that when you bid adieu to this your Alma Mater, you come in a healthy and active condition. The orbit of the subject under review is very wide. I am not going to discuss any question of law and I am doing this because I deem it to be of capital importance for you to become spiritually united with our profession- that profession which is the goal of your studies, which is equivalent to your very lives and to which upon must exclusively and wholeheartedly devote yourselves. You must, therefore, become familiar with the spirit of your profession, because otherwise you will feel alien to it, ever-diffident and restless. The knowledge of its secrets and of its glorious attributes will prove to be the keystone of the arch of your lives, because it will procure your ideal happiness; the opposite attitude of indifference will some day or other ripen into contempt ~f your profession ; you will be always looking for respite in other quarters and maybe in other spheres of life. Then your profession will loathe you and your state will savour of the most abject misery. The end will certainly not be bright and this "lame and impotent conclusion" will only be due to your not having tried to know this noble profession well. It is with this purpose at the back of my mind that I am now going to try to give you glimpses of the vast subject: "The importance of the legal profession."