opinion and its official and final legal expositors.  If the lawyers have any reason to misinterpret a serious political problem, the difficulty of dealing therewith is much increased, because in addition to the ordinary risks of political therapeutics there will be added that of a false diagnosis by the family doctor.  The adequacy of the lawyers’ training, the disinterestedness of their political motives, the fairness of their mental outlook, and the closeness of their contact with the national public opinion—­all become matters of grave public concern.

It can be fairly asserted that the qualifications of the American lawyer for his traditional task as the official interpreter and guide of American constitutional democracy have been considerably impaired.  Whatever his qualifications have been for the task (and they have, perhaps, been over-estimated) they are no longer as substantial as they were.  Not only has the average lawyer become a less representative citizen, but a strictly legal training has become a less desirable preparation for the candid consideration of contemporary political problems.

Since 1870 the lawyer has been traveling in the same path as the business man and the politician.  He has tended to become a professional specialist, and to give all his time to his specialty.  The greatest and most successful American lawyers no longer become legislators and statesmen as they did in the time of Daniel Webster.  They no longer obtain the experience of men and affairs which an active political life brings with it.  Their professional practice, whenever they are successful, is so remunerative and so exacting that they cannot afford either the time or the money which a political career demands.  The most eminent American lawyers usually remain lawyers all their lives; and if they abandon private practice at all, it is generally for the purpose of taking a seat on the Bench.  Like nearly all other Americans they have found rigid specialization a condition of success.

A considerable proportion of our legislators and executives continue to be lawyers, but the difference is that now they are more likely to be less successful lawyers.  Knowledge of the law and a legal habit of mind still have a great practical value in political work; and the professional politicians, who are themselves rarely men of legal training, need the services of lawyers whose legal methods are not attenuated by scruples.  Lawyers of this class occupy the same relation to the local political “Bosses” as the European lawyer used to occupy in the court of the absolute monarch.  He phrases the legislation which the ruler decides to be of private or public benefit; and he acts frequently as his employer’s official mouthpiece and special pleader.