They will bear with me, I hope—as I have borne with them for twenty-five years; for, while I complain of their unreasonable ascendency throughout our land, of their imperious, overbearing, unquestioned domination, I acknowledge that, constituted as we are—We, the People—we cannot do without them—and the more’s the pity. Law we must have, and with it, as if by spontaneous generation—lawyers, till Man himself undergoes a transformation, and his very nature is changed. Both are necessary evils—much like war, pestilence, and famine, or lunatic-asylums, poor-houses, and penitentiaries; or apothecaries’ shops, with their adulterous abominations; and every other substitute for, and abridgment of, human liberty, human happiness, the laws of health, or the instinct of self-reliance. If men will not do as they would be done by; if they will not be “temperate in all things”—then they deserve to be drugged, and blistered, and bled here by the doctors, and there by the lawyers, till they have come to their senses, or can no longer be dealt with profitably by either; for, although every man, according to the worthy Joe Miller, may be his own washerwoman—at least in Ireland—it is very clear that in this country, he might as well undertake to be his own jailer, as his own lawyer. I would go further; for, like the illustrious Hungarian, I desire to conciliate and satisfy, not the few but the many; not only my brethren of the bar, but everybody else worth satisfying; I would even admit—and how could I well go further, and “hope to be forgiven?”—that, in view of Man’s nature, as developed by our social institutions, Law and Lawyers both, may be, and sometimes are, under special circumstances, not only a necessary evil, but a very good thing. _There!_ I have said it—and let them make the most of it. I mean to admit all I can—and much good may it do them! But then, I would ask, if we may not have too much, even of a good thing? I hold that we may; and I appeal for proof to the countless volumes of law which cannot be understood by any but lawyers; nor by any two of them alike, till every other word, perhaps, in a long paragraph has been settled by adjudication—two or three different ways—after solemn argument.