THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R. January 19, 1920. Dined at the ----'s last night. Judge ---- was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late. Three lawyers are too many for a dinner. I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day. Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards. The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them. My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards. (I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--because everybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.) Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.--their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate. It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights. You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you. My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants. If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do.