made no professional success corresponding
to that of Mr. Root. Mr. Hughes, also, was a successful lawyer. The
reform movement has brought into prominence many public-spirited
lawyers, who, either as attorney-generals or as district attorneys, have
sought vigorously to enforce the law and punish its violators. The
lawyers, like every class of business and professional men, have felt
the influence of the reforming ideas, which have become so conspicuous
in American practical politics, and they have performed admirable and
essential work on behalf of reform.

But it is equally true that the most prominent and thorough-going
reformers, such as Roosevelt, Bryan, and Hearst, are not lawyers by
profession, and that the majority of prominent American lawyers are not
reformers. The tendency of the legally trained mind is inevitably and
extremely conservative. So far as reform consists in the enforcement of
the law, it is, of course, supported by the majority of successful
lawyers; but so far as reform has come to mean a tendency to political
or economic reorganization, it has to face the opposition of the bulk of
American legal opinion. The existing political order has been created by
lawyers; and they naturally believe somewhat obsequiously in a system
for which they are responsible, and from which they benefit. This
government by law, of which they boast, is not only a government by
lawyers, but is a government in the interest of litigation. It makes
legal advice more constantly essential to the corporation and the
individual than any European political system. The lawyer, just as much
as the millionaire and the politician, has reaped a bountiful harvest
from the inefficiency and irresponsibility of American state
governments, and from the worship of individual rights.

They have corporations in Europe, but they have nothing corresponding to
the American corporation lawyer. The ablest American lawyers have been
retained by the special interests. In some cases they have been retained
to perform tasks which must have been repugnant to honest men; but that
is not the most serious aspect of the situation. The retainer which the
American legal profession has accepted from the corporations inevitably
increases its natural tendency to a blind conservatism; and its
influence has been used not for the purpose of extricating the large
corporations from their dubious and dangerous legal situation, but for
the purpose of keeping them en