Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/114

 enumerating the forces that made America dangerous, assign a special place to the legal profession. While warning his parliamentary colleagues against the perils of colonial agitations, he laid particular emphasis on the proclivities of the legal occupation. He told his auditors that the study of the law was more general in America perhaps than in any other country; that the profession there was numerous and powerful; that representatives sent to the congresses were mainly lawyers; that training in law made men "acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, and full of resource." Then he submitted with a broad hint the idea that "when great honors and great emoluments do not win this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary of government."

In rising to social and political power the lawyers gave a peculiar twist to the rhetoric of American statecraft. Before their time, the men who followed intellectual pursuits had been chiefly preachers of the gospel—even the teachers for the grammar schools and colleges had been taken from this class; and while the theologians dominated intellectual interests, weapons for argument, secular as well as religious, were drawn from Biblical lore. The lawyers, on the other hand, consulted and enlarged a body of learning that was secular in nature. Moreover, it was their business to use their learning on any side of any case entrusted to their care, so that they became even more flexible and more adept in dispute than the Hoopers and the Mathers.

Accordingly, the lawyers were well equipped to assume the lead in every public controversy and in fact they did stand in the forefront of the conflict with the mother country. Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Madison, Dickinson, Marshall, William Livingston, and many others of light and power in the Revolution were attorneys by training, if not engaged in the active practice of law. Such were the men who furnished most of the arguments and state papers of the struggle. Such were the men who gave to