Disrespect for law has been aggravated by the changing function of the lawyer since the Civil War. In the forties and fifties, he stood out as a leader in his community, lifted by education above the mass of citizens, often before the public gaze in the court-room and chosen because of his forensic eloquence to deliver many of those set orations which Americans constantly demand, brought forward by the litigation of those days as the avenger of crime, the defender of those unjustly imprisoned, the liberator of the escaping slave, or upholding some great public right on behalf of his city or State--the construction of a toll-free bridge across the Charles, the maintenance of the charter of Dartmouth College. After 1870, this pre-eminence was challenged by the new captains of industry, and their appearance was accompanied by an alteration in the work of many an able lawyer, which soon obscured him to the popular imagination. The formation of large businesses required more and more the skill which he possessed. Rewards for drafting and consultation became greater than for litigation, which was growing tedious and costly, so that his clients avoided it whenever possible. Consequently, he changed from an advocate into a “client care-taker,” seldom visible to the people and often associated in their minds with the powerful and detested corporations which he represented. Much of the prejudice against “corporation lawyers” was unjust, and the business development of to-day would have been impossible without the skill in organization and reorganization of great enterprises which they displayed during the last half century. However, popular opinion of a class is inevitably based, not on all its members, but on a conspicuous few, and the kind of legal career described in Winston Churchill’s “Far Country” was common enough to furnish data for damaging generalizations. In any case, the decline in the public influence of the bar was inevitable, especially as certain businesses retained the exclusive legal services of a staff of men, so that it could be said: “Lawyers used to have clients; now, clients have lawyers.”