Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/113

 of Maryland a local chronicler rendered thanks that there were no lawyers in that colony and no business to occupy such factious members of a community.

In the course of time, however, conditions changed and old prejudices disappeared. When society became more complex and legal questions more involved, the need of skilled attorneys was recognized and in every colony a class of professional practitioners came into existence, which grew rapidly in numbers and influence during the passing decades of the eighteenth century. The door once opened, lawyers managed to win a higher social position in America than their brethren had ever enjoyed in the mother country. Still true to feudal tradition, the English nobleman and fox-hunting squire looked down on the attorney as a kind of serving man, useful in drawing papers though hardly to be treated as an equal; but there was no such gulf to be bridged in America. Merchants, planters, and farmers of the colonies could erect no insurmountable barriers against the disciples of Coke and Lyttleton.

In politics, similarly—in town meetings and in assemblies—lawyers flourished more abundantly than in England. It was the fashion of English landlords and merchants to elect men of their own order to represent them in Parliament but in America, particularly in the Northern colonies, the voters for various reasons more frequently adopted the practice of choosing lawyers to speak for them in local bodies. In the first colonial conference held in New York in 1690, two of the seven members were lawyers; of the twenty-four men who attended the Albany congress of 1754, thirteen belonged to the legal profession; in the first Continental Congress that launched the Revolution, twenty-four of the forty-five delegates were lawyers; in the second Congress that declared independence, twenty-six of the fifty-six delegates were of that class; and in the convention that framed the federal Constitution, thirty-three of the fifty-five members were lawyers.

With good reason, therefore, did Edmund Burke, in