But enough on this point. If I were to write a book, I should not be able to do more than I have done already, so far as the legal and professional doings of my beloved brethren are concerned.
It remains now, that I should say something very briefly, of the disastrous consequences flowing from their political power.
In the first place, it lures all our young men—the silliest as well as the cleverest—who desire to live without work, and to be provided for at the public charge, to betake themselves to the law. It is not only the high-road—but the only high-road to political power. No other profession has a chance with that of the law; and everybody knows it and feels it when broad awake and thinking, instead of dozing. Hence the profession is over-crowded, over-burthened—overwhelmed—and literally dwarfed into comparative nothingness, apart from political power; having not a tittle of the social power it would be fairly entitled to if it were not so adulterated and diluted.
In the second place, we have that national reproach—the instability of our legislation—the perpetual change, that no sober-minded business-man is ever able to foresee or provide against.
And this I aver to be the natural, the inevitable consequence of having for our legislators, men who have a direct personal interest in multiplying or changing our laws, and in making them unintelligible to others.
Let us take one of our young attorneys, and follow him up, year by year, and step by step, to the Halls of Congress, and see how he gets there, and what he is bound to do—for he can do nothing else—after he gets there.
In the first place, it should be borne in mind, that the lawyers we send to our legislative bodies, are not often the able, nor even the ablest of their class—I speak of them as lawyers only, and not as Orators, or Statesmen, or Scholars. They cannot afford to serve the people for the day wages that your stripling, or blockhead of an attorney, who lives only from hand to mouth, would snap at. He who can have a hundred dollars for a speech, will never make speeches at two or three dollars a-day, in our State Legislatures, nor be satisfied with eight dollars a-day in Congress.
And these youngsters of the bar, these third and fourth-rate lawyers, who are held to be good enough for legislators, because they cannot support themselves by their profession, how are they trained for that business?