DIALOGUE BETWEEN A CLIENT AND HIS LAWYER

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      CLIENT.—Well, sir! with regard to the cause of those poor orphans?

      LAWYER.—What do you mean? It is but eighteen years since their estate has been in litigation.

      CLIENT.—I don’t complain of that trifling matter; I know the custom well enough; I respect it, but how in the name of heaven comes it to pass that you have been these three months soliciting a hearing and have not yet obtained it?

      LAWYER.—The reason is because you have not solicited an audience in person in behalf of your pupils; you ought to have waited on the judge several different times, to entreat him to try your cause.

      CLIENT.—It is their duty to do justice of their own accord without waiting till it is asked them. He is a very great man that has it in his power to sit in judgment on men’s lives and fortunes, but he is by no means so to desire that the miserable should wait in his antechamber. I do not go to our parson’s levee to pray and beseech him to have the goodness to sing high mass, why ought I then to petition my judge to discharge the function of his office? In short, after so many and such tedious delays, are we at length going to be so happy as to have our cause tried to-day?

      LAWYER.—Why yes, and there is great likelihood of your carrying a very material point in your process; you have a very decisive article in “Charondas” on your side.

      CLIENT.—This same Charondas was, in all probability, some lord-chancellor in the time of one of the kings of the first race who has passed a law in favor of orphans?

      LAWYER.—By no means, he is no more than a private person who has given his opinion in a great volume which nobody reads, but then your advocate quotes him, the judges take it upon his credit, so there’s your cause gained in a trice.

      CLIENT.—What! do you tell me the opinion of this Judge Charondas passes current for a law?

      LAWYER.—But there is one devilish bad cir­cumstance attends us. Turnet and Brodeau are both against us.

      CLIENT.—These, I suppose, are two other legislators whose laws have much the same authority with those of that other hard-named gentleman.

      LAWYER.—Yes, certainly, as it was impossible to explain the Roman law sufficiently in the present case the world took different sides of the question.

      CLIENT.—What the devil signifies it to bring in the Roman law in this affair? Do we live in the present age under Theodosius or Justinian?

      LAWYER.—By no means, but our fore­fathers, you must know, had a pro­digious pas­sion for tilt­ing and fox hunting; they ran all, as if they were mad, to the Holy Land with their doxies. You will grant me that men in such a hurry of business of consequence could not be supposed to have time on their hands to frame a complete body of universal jurisprudence.

      CLIENT.—Aye, aye, I understand you. For want of laws of your own you are forced to beg of Charondas and Justinian to be so good as tell you how you should proceed when an inheritance is to be divided.

      LAWYER.—There you are mistaken, we have more laws than all Europe besides; almost every city has a body of laws of its own.

      CLIENT.—Your most obedient. Here’s another miracle.

      LAWYER.—Ah! had your wards been born at Guignes-la-Putain instead of being natives of Melun near Corbeil!

      CLIENT.—Very well; what had happened then, for God’s sake?

      LAWYER.—You should have gained your cause as sure as two and two make four, that’s all, for at this same Guignes-la-Putain there is a custom which is wholly in your favor; but were you to go but two leagues beyond this, you would then be in a very different situation.

      CLIENT.—But pray are not Guignes and Melun both in France? And can anything be more absurd or horrible than to tell me that what’s right in one village is wrong in another? By what fatal barbarity does it happen that people born in the same country do yet live under different laws?

      LAWYER.—The reason is, that formerly the inhabitants of Guignes and those of Melun were not inhabitants of the same country: these two fine cities formed in the golden days of yore two distinct empires, and the august sovereign of Guignes, though a vassal to the king of France, gave laws to his own subjects. Those laws depended on the good will and pleasure of his major domo, who, it seems, could not read, so that they have been handed down by a most venerable tradition from father to son, so that the whole race of the barons de Guignes becoming extinct, to the irrecoverable loss of all mankind, the conceits of their first lackeys still exist and are held for the fundamental law of the land. The case is exactly the same in every six leagues in the whole kingdom, so that you change laws every time you change horses, so you may judge what a taking we poor advocates are in when we are to plead, for instance, for an inhabitant of Poictou against an inhabitant of Auvergne.

      CLIENT.—But these same men of Poictou, Auvergne, with your Guignes gentry, are they not all dressed in the same manner? Is it a harder matter to use the same laws than it is to wear the same clothes? And since it is evident the tailors and cobblers understand one another from one end of the kingdom to the other, why cannot the judges learn of them, and follow so excellent an example?

      LAWYER.—You desire a thing altogether as impossible as it would be to bring the nation to make use of one sort of weights and measures. Why would you have the laws everywhere the same when you see the point is different in all places? For my own part, after thinking till my head was like to split, all I have been able to conclude for the soul of me, is this: That as the measure of Paris is different from that at St. Denis, it follows that men’s judgments must also be different in both. The varieties of nature are infinite, and it would be wrong in us to endeavor to render uniform what she intends shall not be so.

      CLIENT.—Yet, now I think on it, I have a strong notion the English have but one sort of weight and measures.

      LAWYER.—The English! aye. Why the English are mere barbarians; they have, it is true, but one kind of measure, but, to make amends, they have a score of different religions.

      CLIENT.—There you mention something strange indeed! Is it possible that a nation who live under the same laws, should not likewise live under the same religion?

      LAWYER.—It is; which makes it plain they are abandoned to their own reprobate understandings.

      CLIENT.—But may not it also prove that they think laws made for regulating the external actions of men and religion the internal? Possibly the English, and other nations, were of opinion that laws related to the concernments of man with man and that religion regarded man’s relation to God. I am sure I should never quarrel with an Anabaptist who should take it into his head to be christened at thirty years old, but I should be horridly offended with him should he fail paying his bill of exchange. They who sin against God ought to be punished in the other world; they who sin against man ought to be chastised in this.

      LAWYER.—I understand nothing of all this. I am just going to plead your cause.

      CLIENT.—I wish to God you understood it better first.