In all England and Wales only about 17,000 solicitors took out annual certificates last year. This indicates the number of offices and does not include clerks (many of whom have been admitted to practice as solicitors), nor those who, for one reason or another, do not practice. Instead of being concentrated, like the barristers, in the Inns of Court in London, solicitors are scattered all over the town and throughout the Kingdom itself. Some, especially in the minor towns or poorer quarters of London, are in a small way of business and must earn rather a precarious living. Others are of a still lower class and seek business of a more or less disreputable character by devious methods, but all are supposed to have been carefully educated in the law and are answerable to their Society and to the courts for questionable practices. The division of the profession between the solicitors and the Bar is no doubt a survival in modern, or socialistic, England of aristocratic conditions which it is the tendency of the times to weaken, if not eventually to abolish. It is somewhat hard upon the solicitor of real ability to be confined to a limited field and to feel that, no matter how great his powers and acquirements, it is impossible to rise to the best position in his profession without abandoning his branch and beginning all over again in the barrister's ranks. In associating with solicitors, one can not fail to be struck by their attitude towards barristers, as a class, which is hardly flattering to the latter; they frequently allude somewhat lightly to them as though they were useless ornaments and as if such a division of the profession were rather unnecessary. Upon asking whether the distinction exists in America, they receive the information that it does not with evident approval. The advantages, however, of the separation of the functions of the solicitor from those of the barrister are distinctly felt in the superior skill, as trial lawyers, developed by the restriction of court practice to the limited membership of the Bar, which would hardly exist if the practice were distributed over the whole field of both branches of the profession. Then, too, the small number of persons composing the Bar enables greater control by the benchers over their professional conduct, and helps to maintain a high standard of ethics and the feeling of _esprit de corps_. Moreover, the Bar is not distracted from the science, by contact with the business, of the law and it is saved from the contaminating effect of participation in the sordid details of litigation. At the same time, this very condition may be calculated to develop in the average barrister, as distinguished from one of real ability, an attitude approaching dilettanteism.