They have no retaining fee
and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them
20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind
conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You
die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is
perspiring for his client at L100 a day.
This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of
drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the
eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and
never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that
Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns
L130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that
Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry
which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble
nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp
distributor to keep him in bread and butter.
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