Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/95

Rh shared his god-like prestige. The habit of having a privileged priestly class was never as distinctly helpful to the tribe as were the king habit and the rules-of-conduct habit, and it was also, from the very nature of its origin, inevitably touched with a power for harm which just as inevitably increased as the social organism developed, expanded and became more sophisticated. In so far, therefore, as the lawyer caste of today takes its peculiar and exclusive powers from its direct precursor, the priestly caste, so far is it predestined to harmfulness.

And in so far, again, as it takes its special powers by direct inheritance from a quasi-ecclesiastical source, so far is the habit of tacitly granting those powers guarded with a quasi-religious zeal by those, the ignorant populace, who hold it. The divinity that was once of the very essence of the tribal chief, hedges still the kingly majority of the present social hierarchy and that majority's priest-born, privileged law exploiters. The creed of the devout believer in the efficacy of the law in all the aspects of it I have named—the law enforcer, the law maker and the law exploiter—this creed includes by implication, if not in so many words, an article declaring the divine origin of the power of those who give, those who enforce and those who align the law.

Inevitably, in view of its origin and character, the lawyer class forms the most powerful and self-assertive of labor unions. It is the most powerful, for it has behind it the authority of both the law-enforcing and the law-formulating powers. Indeed, it is itself, as already shown, the third in the trinity of powers which constitute to-day the whole of that habit-of-having-the-law which was once the habit-of-having-an-autocrat. A labor union, possessed of some of a ruler's supreme authority, of necessity becomes, in accordance with well-known laws of human nature, arrogant, overbearing and prone to serve its own personal ends at some sacrifice of the ends for which it was constituted. For an example, one may cite that habit of procrastination in which the caste still indulges in the exercise of its functions, a habit the painful effects of which an elaborate ritual and an esoteric terminology tend somewhat to mystify but not at all to mitigate.

Gaining its authority and its sanctity largely from a remote past, being desirous of retaining both, and feeling that both are accentuated by constant reference to their ancient and noble lineage, the lawyer caste draws, constantly for its pronouncements not on the merits of the case in hand, but on the whole body of ancient doctrine. Herein this caste resembles its foster sister, the ecclesiastical group; but while the latter is moved constantly to look forward, if not by the good sense of its units, then at least by the pressure of internal competition, the former is supported in its enjoyment of reminiscence and its scorn of evolution by the whole law-having habit of which it is a part.

In one aspect of the special powers of the lawyer class we find an