The same course of remark applies to civil causes. A defendant has a legal right to require that the plaintiffs demand against him should be proved and proceeded with according to law. If it were thrown upon the parties themselves, there would he a very great inequality between them, according to their intelligence, education, and experience, respectively. Indeed, it is one of the most striking advantages of having a learned profession, who engage as a business in representing parties in courts of justice, that men are thus brought nearer to a condition of equality, that causes are tried and decided upon their merits, and do not depend upon the personal characters and qualifications of the immediate parties.[17] Thus, too, if a suit be instituted against a man to recover damages for a tort, the defendant has a right to all the ingenuity and eloquence he can command in his defence, that even if he has committed a wrong, the amount of the damages may not exceed what the plaintiff is justly entitled to recover. But the claim of a plaintiff stands upon a somewhat different footing. Counsel have an undoubted right, and are in duty bound, to refuse to be concerned for a plaintiff in the legal pursuit of a demand, which offends his sense of what is just and right. The courts are open to the party in person to prosecute his own claim, and plead his own cause; and although he ought to examine and be well-satisfied before he refuses to a suitor the benefit of his professional skill and learning, yet it would be on his part an immoral act to afford that assistance, when his conscience told him that the client was aiming to perpetrate a wrong through the means of some advantage the law may have afforded him. "It is a popular but gross mistake," says the late Chief Justice Gibson, "to suppose that a lawyer owes no fidelity to any one except his client, and that the latter is the keeper of his professional conscience. He is expressly bound by his official oath to behave himself, in his office of attorney, with all fidelity to the court as well as the client; and he violates it when he consciously presses for an unjust judgment, much more so when he presses for the conviction of an innocent man.... The high and honorable office of a counsel would be degraded to that of a mercenary, were he compelled to do the biddings of his client against the dictates of his conscience."[18] The sentiment has been expressed in flowing numbers by our great commentator, Sir William Blackstone:-- "To Virtue and her friends a friend, Still may my voice the weak defend: Ne'er may my prostituted tongue Protect the oppressor in his wrong; Nor wrest the spirit of the laws, To sanctify the villain's cause."