What Moral Law?
And this week we have the first book on the Ward business, and are shortly to be faced (or not, as the case may be) with the Denning Re- port. The more one thinks of it, the more one is astonished at the mere idea of this inquiry. What on earth is the purpose it is supposed to serve? Is our public life to become one vast circus of wowsers briefed by snoopers? It is not British morals that have shown up so badly this year. They are just as they always were—so-so. It is British justice. Why is it that in New York one finds the men in the great law firms so enor- mously superior to their English equivalents? Why is it that leading English judges seem, com- pared with the members of the Supreme Court, like magistrates' clerks in nineteenth-century Runcorn? The Bar used to be a dignified pro- fession: at some point in the last fifty years it must have lost its attraction tto men of scope. On the bench, the inhumane and the uncivilised; at the prosecutor's table, the slick and the smearer. Perhaps someone should set up an inde- pendent tribunal to judge the judges. Pharisaism, so I was taught, is a worse sin than sexuality.
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