Where there is smoke, there is fire. Underneath all this agitation is a deep-seated suspicion and dissatisfaction aroused by the legal profession and the whole machinery of justice. It exists despite the fact observed by Bryce, that our system of written constitutions has created a strongly marked legal spirit in the people and accustomed them to look at all questions in a legal way--a characteristic exemplified when other peoples judged the Covenant of the League of Nations as an expression of broad policies and the aspirations of a hundred years, while we went at it word by word with a dissecting knife and a microscope as if it had been a millionaire’s will or an Income Tax Act. Moreover, although lawyers as a class are unpopular, they are elected to half the seats in the legislatures and in Congress. The profession which cannot boast a single English Prime Minister in the century between Perceval and Asquith, has trained every President who was not a general, except Harding. Perhaps this very fact that lawyers receive public positions out of all proportion to their numbers partially accounts for the prejudice felt against them by men in other professions and occupations. Hostility to lawyers and case-law is no new phenomenon in this country. Puritans and Quakers arrived with unpleasant memories of the English bench and bar, who had harried them out of their homes. To them, law meant heresy trials, and the impression that these left on the minds of their victims has been set down forever by Bunyan in the prosecution of Faithful at Vanity Fair. The Colonists were no more anxious to transplant some Lord Hate-good, his counsellors, and his law books to our shores, than Eugene V. Debs would strive to set up injunctions and sedition statutes if he were founding a socialistic commonwealth in the South Seas. The popular attitude toward lawyers was re-inforced by the clergy who were naturally reluctant to have their great moral and intellectual influence disputed by men who would hire themselves out to argue either side of any question. The ministers who ruled Massachusetts and Connecticut by the Law of Moses, wanted no rivals to challenge their decisions upon the authority of Bracton and Coke. And everywhere, except perhaps on the Southern plantations, the complicated structure of feudal doctrines, which constituted such a large part of English law well into the 18th century, was as unsuited to Colonial ways and needs as a Gothic cathedral in the wilderness. Life was so pressing, time was so short, labour so scarce, that the only law which could receive acceptance must be so simple that the settlers could apply it themselves. Although Justice Story has spread wide the belief that our ancestors brought the Common Law to New England on the _Mayflower_, the truth is that only a few fragments got across. These were rapidly supplemented by rules based on pioneer conditions. Much the same phenomenon occurred as in the California of 1849, where