"Yes, ingenious in making the worse appear the better reason." "The highest compliment you could pay me. We had the worst side of the case." "So I perceived." "And, in spite of it, succeeded in gaining for our client." "And doing a great wrong." "I have nothing to do with that. My duty was to my client. I was bound to gain his cause for him, and I did so." "At the expense of truth, justice, and integrity." "If you please to say so. That comes under the head of abstract morals. But with such abstractions lawyers have nothing to do. We are bound in conscience to take care of our client's interests. He commits them to our hands, and honor and honesty demand that we should protect them by every means in our power." "Not by unfair means," said Hudson. "If your client's cause is not sound, how can you sustain it by sound arguments? You must divert the attention of the court from the true point at issue, and take advantage of every defect or error of your opponent to make his good cause appear a bad one. Here lies the test of a truly good lawyer. I see no great credit that a man deserves for gaining a perfectly plain case. Anybody ought to do that. It is in the bad cause that the lawyer shows his real power." "And this is legal integrity!" said the student. "No, Lawrence Dunbar, I will not credit it! The lawyer may be the guardian of rights, and yet remain true to himself. You have mistaken the true character of the profession." "There can be but two sides to a question. A right side and a wrong side. And one of these a lawyer has to argue. If he is on the wrong side, pray how is he to do justice to his client and not violate what you would call legal integrity?" "True," said the student, "there is, to every question in dispute, a right side and a wrong side; but where the right and where the wrong lies, is not so easily determined. What the lawyer has to do is to advocate or defend his client's rights, nothing more. This is his use in the community; and when he goes beyond it, he goes beyond what his client has a right to demand or he a right to give. Depend upon it, Lawrence—and you must pardon my plain utterance of what is in my mind—the lawyer who permits himself to use unfair means to gain a client's cause, will not find it a hard task to continue his client's cause year after year, in order, if possible, to swell the amount of his fees." "I don't know that you are far out of the way," was the young man's unblushing avowal. "In fact, that is done every day. I know a young lawyer who has yet had but two cases of importance, and he nurses them well, I assure you. They afford him a very comfortable support. Now would not he be a fool to close up these cases in a week, when it is the easiest thing in the world to continue them for a year or eighteen months? Do you blame him?" "I do, for he is not an honest man."