Sir Edward Abbott Parry

“ An argument which does not convince yourself, may convince the judge to whom you urge it: and if it does convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong, and he is right. It is his business to judge; and you are not to be confident in your own opinion that a cause is bad, but to say all you can for your client, and then hear the Judge’s opinion.” Boswell: “But, Sir, does not affecting a warmth when you have no warmth, and appearing to be clearly of one opinion when you are in reality of another opinion, does not such dissimulation impair one’s honesty? ”

“ I do not say I learned all this about Manchester in one Whit-week. On the contrary, it took me a quarter of a century to find out what little I have learned, and even now I recognise that I am only outside the veil of a great mystery. For the heart and life and being of Manchester and its surroundings is a human study worthy of a sane and honest philosopher, if such a one exist, and I am only attempting to set down a few traveller’s notes, as it were. ”

“ About the only thing an average Box Office cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the vox populi, which is far [3] nearer the vox Dei than the voice of the expert witness. ”

“ The habit of mind, custom, and the right action of good citizens do not sanction enforcing debt by imprisonment. It is only the greedy, low-down citizens who deign to use it. But the matter is lightly regarded. A few thousand poor people doing time for trumpery debts cannot, anyhow, be allowed to trouble the sleep of the middle-class voter, and what am I but an untaught knave to bring their slovenly, unhandsome corpses betwixt the wind and his nobility?
It is not only the very poor who are dragged to gaol that suffer. ”

“ I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English Bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English Constitution, can have no existence. From the moment that any advocate can be permitted to say that he will or will not stand between the Crown and the subject arraigned in the court where he daily sits to practise—from that moment the liberties of England are at an end. ”

“ All the best writing in the world—short of the very highest and most sacred work—is done for the fun of the thing. Some people prefer the phrase the love of the thing, and say it is the love of the beautiful, or the love of mischief, or the love of romance that moves them to writing. But I prefer to call it writing for the fun of the thing, because that describes to me exactly what I mean. All games should be played in this spirit, and writing is a far less serious game with most of us than games like bridge or chess or golf or cricket. ”

“ Rent, taxation, education, physical and moral improvement, eugenics, all the social discussions of the time, land you back on the question of the living wage. Sometimes, I think, we are on the eve of a new era when every capable honest citizen will have the same right to a living wage that he now has to free board and lodging and stone breaking in the workhouse. I would rather have a legal right to a living wage than a vote, unless I was clear that I could use the latter to obtain the former and many better things to boot. ”

“ The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses, all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets. ”

“ I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world. ”

“ THE LAMP OF HONESTY
The great advocate is like the great actor: he fills the stage for his span of life, succeeds, gains our applause, makes his last bow, and the curtain falls. Nothing is so elusive as the art of acting, unless indeed it be the sister art of advocacy. You cannot say that the methods of Garrick, Kean or Irving, Erskine, Hawkins or Russell, were the right methods or the only methods, or even that they were the best methods of practising their several arts ”

“ In professions such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery, is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. ”

“ And the lurry horses, like the Sunday School children, have their feast day also, which is the first of May, when, bedecked with ribbons and caparisoned in gleaming harness, they parade the streets. Who that has seen them will ever forget the splendid teams of Robert Clay, the bleacher, as they swing round into Albert Square on a sunny first of May and gladden the hearts of Manchester man, woman and child, with a vision of strength and wealth and beauty and business? ”

“ The days of wandering in cloisters and gardens, putting cases to one’s fellow-students, and listening to the wisdom of elders by the margin of the fountain are, alas! not for us. But even to-day a wise youngster should recognise that sitting in court to listen to the conduct of cases, attendance at circuit mess and dining in Hall, where the law-talk of seniors may still on occasion be of value—these things are all forms of industry, for the advocate can only learn the true creed of his faith from oral tradition. ”

“ Attachment to places is quite irrespective of their pleasances. The fields and orchards of Kent, white with blossom in the spring, purple and golden with the heavy fruits of autumn, can never be as acceptable to me as the mud building land of South Manchester. The Embankment and the Strand—​even in its debased modern form—​and the Temple Gardens and the fountain will always be home to one who started life as a Londoner, and was educated in the cellars of Somerset House. ”

“ I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed, or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no necessity of appealing to that institution for support. ”

“ From 1869 until to-day over three hundred thousand English citizens have been actually imprisoned who have not been guilty of any crime whatsoever. They have been imprisoned mainly for poverty or, if you will, for improvidence—that blessed word that so insidiously describes in the poor that failure in economic asceticism, that lack of cold self-denial of luxury and extravagance, that absence of patient thrift and simplicity of life—characteristic features which are never wanting in the beautiful lives of those social classes above them that the poor must learn to look up to and to imitate. ”

“ It would appear from the history of advocacy that the flame of the lamp of eloquence may vary from time to time in heat and colour. One cannot say that the style of one advocate is correct and another incorrect, since the style is the attribute of the man and the generation he is trying to persuade. Yet, however different the style may be, the essential power of persuasion must be present. He must, as Hamlet says, be able to play upon his jury, knowing the stops, and sounding them from the lowest note to the top of the compass. ”

“ What little accidents determine the course of a man’s life! We start like streams from the mountain source, intending to fight our way down into the valleys where our fathers have preceded us. But on the upper slopes at the outset of our career we meet some boulder or bank of earth and are turned west instead of east, and so away into quite other valleys and along towards another sea. If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that I should be County Court Judge of Manchester within fifteen years I should have put a sovereign on the other way or given the long odds in a hopeful spirit. ”

“ Free law is, of course, a grand ideal, and may again attract legal reformers; but, without attaining that ideal, it might be possible to abandon in a great measure the fees collected from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and surgery, might be free to the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who are unable to pay fees and costs without running into debt. It will take a Savonarola to convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing subject for a youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed of what the insurance world calls “a good life.” ”