ment by and for the people has to perform
is to rectify past mistakes and correct the evils growing out of
corruption and class rule. A government without authority to interfere
with vested rights would have little power to promote the general
welfare through legislation.

The adoption of the Constitution brought this doctrine from the realm of
political speculation into the arena of practical politics. The men who
framed and set up our Federal government were shrewd enough to see that
if the interests of the property-holding classes were to be given
effective protection, it was necessary that political power should rest
ultimately upon a class basis. This they expected to accomplish largely
through the judicial veto and the power and influence of the Supreme
Court. The effect of establishing the supremacy of this branch of the
government was to make the legal profession virtually a ruling class. To
their charge was committed under our system of government the final
authority in all matters of legislation. They largely represent by
virtue of their training and by reason of the interests with which they
are affiliated, the conservative as opposed to the democratic
influences. The power and influence exerted by lawyers in this country
are the natural outgrowth of the constitutional position of our Supreme
Court. Its supremacy is in the last analysis the supremacy of lawyers as
a class and through them of the various interests which they represent
and from which they derive their support. This explains the fact so
often commented on by foreign critics, that in this country lawyers
exert a predominant influence in political matters.

We are still keeping alive in our legal and constitutional literature
the eighteenth-century notion of liberty. Our future lawyers and judges
are still trained in the old conception of government--that the chief
purpose of a constitution is to limit the power of the majority. In the
meantime all other democratic countries have outgrown this early
conception which characterized the infancy of democracy. They have in
theory at least repudiated the eighteenth-century doctrine that the few
have a right to thwart the will of the many. The majority has in such
countries become the only recognized source of legitimate authority.
"There is no fulcrum _outside_ of the majority, and therefore there is
nothing on which, as _against_ the majority resistance or lengthened
opposition can lean."[179] This st