As a great scholar and lawyer wrote to me in commenting upon the difference between past and present:

"A sense of changed conditions spread over everything. The conscience of the Nation was merged in the pride and glory of successful war. The sensitiveness as to the intellectual value of high legal attainment and effort was lost with the circumstances which had made them necessary. Then came the influx of wealth, the creation of new sources of prosperity and power, the growing sense of empire. As opposed to these, the Bar presented the spectacle of distinct bodies of men who, however deserving, had been shorn of their highest centralizing motive, who were without a local center as in England, but were split up into parts often incongruous, mere fractions of many separate communities, every day becoming more

numerous.

Slowly and noiselessly as the falling tide, the change set in, until, gradually and imperceptibly, the lawyer has been deprived of most of those splendid qualities, which once made his office so illustrious in the land.

Wealth has stolen his social position; intellectual and scholastic attainments no longer winbecause they are rarely found combined with a practical and adaptable mind; the cultivation of

eloquence has fallen into desuetude; much of his professional occupation and emoluments have been taken from him by combinations largely composed of laymen, by "Title Searching" companies, and collection and other mere business agencies, whose principal alleged merit towards the community is cheapness; and the lawyer stands before the community shorn of his prestige, clothed in the unattractive garb of a mere commercial agent-a flexible and convenient gobetween, often cultivating every kind of equivocal quality as the means of success, rather than a deep and accurate knowledge of the principles of jurisprudence-but always an exceptionally good business man.

The change in the legal profession, in the character, influence, and position of the lawyer, are more vividly illustrated in the large cities of the country. In the rural districts some traces of old professional life still exist, but even there the old guard of lawyers is succumbing to the influences which have wrought the change elsewhere, and is disappearing behind the hills of the past like a setting sun.

I do not mean to broadly assert that the calling of a lawyer has lost all of its honorableness, or that his general influence has been entirely dissipated. I affirm, however, that his aristocratic and social prestige has disappeared; that his

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moral and intellectual standard has been lowered, and that the natural and legitimate influence, which his office entitles him to wield, no longer exists in its proper vigor. Since the war, a deep and profound gulf has been made between the past and the present; and out of the prolific womb of national life, a new legal epoch has been born; a new race of lawyers, different in education, manners, and thought from our legal ancestors, has sprung up, lacking the dignity, learning, and influence, which the old régime possessed.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PRESS, THE STAGE, THE LITERATURE, AND THE BAR, SINCE THE CIVIL WAR.

NEW epochs in national life, in the habits, manners, and morals of the people, are not ushered in to the sound of trumpets and martial music, or by written declarations or proclamations as political principles sometimes are,-like Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence. They cannot be traced to a certain time and place, but noiselessly and gradually grow out of prevailing conditions of commercial, social, and political life, evolution. No one can accurately fix the birth of national habits, and it is only when they are fastened upon us, like the parasite upon the tree, that we are deeply aroused to their existence.

It cannot be overlooked that the new historical era, inaugurated in this country by the Civil War, was followed by changes of the most radical nature, not only in the national characteristics, manners, and habits of the people, but in all professions, trades, and businesses, and noticeably

so in the professions of law, journalism, histrionic art, and in general literature. As I have said, the organs of public opinion, like those of the body, are generally sympathetic. What affects the one, quickly communicates itself to the others.

It may at least serve the purpose of an illustration of the changes which have come over us, of the Bar, to advert to the Press, the Stage, and Literature, because a brief comparison between these last-named occupations, before and after the war, furnishes a proper analogy and prelude to a study of the condition of the legal profession.

Contrasted with those of forty years ago, the newspapers are almost unrecognizable. They are now huge, illustrated, pictorial magazines, daily chronicling all the events of the world, with more or less accuracy-running the whole gamut of human and divine affairs-entering, with fiendish glee, into the minutest details of social and domestic life, and then sold for a mere song. The reader is furnished daily with not only a full statement of the doings of the whole world, because the throbbings of the telegraph give out every minute the news from all quarters of the globe, but he has photographs of the principal actors in these occurrences, accompanied by graphic pictures of the events, and this huge journal is placed, in a metropolis, every morning, upon the breakfast table. The avidity for news