While the concept of the legal profession summons up a vision of a learned profession with a powerful social and economic position, it is difficult to recognise the South African profession of this period in this image. A colonial profession has to struggle to establish for itself a place that befits the image bestowed from the metropolis. The number of lawyers in South Africa was small. In 1920 there were approximately a hundred and fifty barristers and two thousand solicitors in practice (Nathan 1919: 411). Socially the background of lawyers ranged from established colonial families, to recently arrived and not very successful members of the profession in England and Ireland, to upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants, and Afrikaner rural practitioners whose legal practices were often an adjunct to a range of other commercial activities. Perhaps the most obvious place to begin a description of the South African profession is with its divisions. In all provinces but Natal there was, on English lines, a division between Bar and Side-Bar, in South African terminology between advocates, who had the right to appear in the Supreme Courts, and attorneys. The lawyers were also divided most importantly between English and Afrikaner, whose mutual political hostility and social separateness came to dominate social and professional interactions. For the first half of the century the language of courtrooms and judges was overwhelmingly English, and this was increasingly resented by Afrikaans practitioners.