free
institutions.

The evolution of the Bar in this country during colonial
times--especially in New England--was a curious counterpart of the
history of the English Bar three centuries before. The founders of New
England came here to escape a persecution for their religious beliefs
and law was closely connected in their minds with the injustices, the
inequalities and the rigid hardships of the common law as administered
by judges appointed and removable at the will of the Tudors and Stuarts.
At that time lawyers exercising their profession were the instruments of
a system that had become non-progressive. They had lost the principles
of justice in technicalities and had become mere political tools in the
hands of tyrants. But in England, the law soon lost its narrowing, hard
and inflexible character through the intervention of courts of equity
and through the genius and broad views of great judges of common law
like Mansfield. It was modified further by the civil law and by the
needs of a developing world commerce, and after the action of the Long
Parliament and the Revolution it was no longer used as an instrument of
tyranny.

In this country, however, the Puritans and the Pilgrims approved of
neither the common law nor the English judicial system, and as lawyers
were only part of that system, they considered the abolition of the
profession from their society as an end devoutly to be wished for and
promptly sought. Among the Pilgrim fathers there was not a single
lawyer, while among the Puritans there were only four or five who had
been educated as lawyers and even they had never practiced. The
consequence was that during the seventeenth century and far into the
eighteenth, lawyers had little place in the social or political
institutions of the colonies. In New England there was a theocracy. The
judges--none of them lawyers--were all either ministers or directly
under the influence of the clergy. A colonial common law grew up among
them, based on a theological reasoning and was really administered
without lawyers. In the Massachusetts body of liberties, it was provided
that a man unfit to plead might employ a person not objectionable to the
Court to plead for him, on condition that he give him no fee or reward.
In 1663 a usual or common attorney was prohibited from sitting in the
general court.

As society progressed, however, as commerce and trade increased, as
wealth grew, as business transactions became more ex