annot be pacified by money, but passes some act which
promises to be annoying, the first instinct of the capitalist is to
retain counsel, not to advise him touching his duty under the law, but
to devise a method by which he may elude it, or, if he cannot elude it,
by which he may have it annulled as unconstitutional by the courts. The
lawyer who succeeds in this branch of practice is certain to win the
highest prizes at the bar. And as capital has had now, for more than one
or even two generations, all the prizes of the law within its gift, this
attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping the American
legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards the constitutional form
of government which exists in the United States, as a convenient method
of obtaining his own way against a majority, but the lawyer has learned
to worship it as a fetich. Nor is this astonishing, for, were written
constitutions suppressed, he would lose most of his importance and much
of his income. Quite honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come
to believe that a sheet of paper soiled with printers' ink and
interpreted by half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in
armchairs, has some inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can
arrest the march of omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this
view of American civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually
been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes, perhaps
directly through the intervention of some president or governor whom
they have had nominated by a convention controlled by their money, or
else, if the judiciary has been elective, they have caused sympathetic
judges to be chosen by means of a mechanism like Tammany, which they
have frankly bought.

I wish to make myself clearly understood. Neither capitalists nor
lawyers are necessarily, or even probably, other than conscientious men.
What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have
been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this
specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of
perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored
them has changed. All that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is
the excess of his excentricity, or his deviation from that resultant of
forces to which he must conform. To us, however, at present, neither
the morality nor the present mental excentricity of the capitalist is
so mate