The Essays: Unto This Last, suggests that Five great intellectual professions relating to the daily necessities of life have hitherto existed in every civilized nation: The Soldiers profession is to defend it. The Pastors to teach it. The Physicians to keep it in health. The Merchants to provide for it. The Lawyers to enforce justice in it. I chose the Lawyers profession. But before I came to Law I had tried Economics; I had tried Literature, and I had tried Sociology. None did work. My interest in Literature ended very early when I was required to discuss that; Because the degree of feminine temperament revealed in his works could not have been by a man, Shakespeare is a woman. Do you agree? If not, why not? That was the day I bade farewell to Literature. For the same reason, I abandoned Sociology after a Sessional Examination Paper in which the first question read something like this: When an Englishman quarrels with his wife, he goes to the garden; a Frenchman to his mistress; an American to his attorney; an African marries another one. Discuss. But I think Economics confused me even much more. I could not reconcile the simplicity of Adam Smith that if you can teach a parrot to say supply and demand you have made an economist of him with the significance of Professor W. Arthur Lewis that economics is too important a subject to leave in the hands of economists alone. I decided to stay with Law: charmed by my great fascination for the spoken word, the formulated idea, the expressed thought and the system of logic manifest in its study. Our subject this morning therefore will be neither on The Mind of Wole Soyinka nor The Poems of Lenrie Peters, nor The Unintended Consequences of Intended Actions nor The Mystery of Capital nor Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. All these are worthwhile subjects for other lectures. Our subject this morning is: WE ARE CALLED TO LEADERSHIP:THE ENDURING RESPONSIBILITY OF LAWYERS.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 14:20:00 +0000
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