But even for this they have a justification—or a plea in bar. The law is a “jealous mistress,” we are told, and will endure no rival; a monarch “who bears no brother near the throne.” And well do they act upon this belief; and well do they teach it by precept and by practice; for few indeed are they, even among the foremost, who have gathered up, in the course of a long life, any considerable amount of miscellaneous knowledge, notwithstanding the reputation they sometimes acquire, in a single day, by their insolent questioning of learned, shy and modest professional men, or experts, after they have once got them caged and cornered, and tied up hand and foot in a witness-box, and allowed to speak only when they are spoken to; there to be badgered for the amusement of people outside, more ignorant, if possible, than the learned counsel themselves; but incapable of seeing through the counterfeit, which, while it makes them laugh, makes the “judicious grieve;” and mistaking for cleverness and smartness the blundering audacity of an ignorant and garrulous, though privileged pretender, who does not know that it often requires about as much knowledge of a subject to propound a safe and proper question, as to answer it: nor that the veriest blockhead may ask twenty questions in a breath, which no mortal man could ever answer, and would not even try to answer, unless he were a still greater blockhead. And now, having swept the stage fore and aft, and secured, as I trust, a patient hearing from the profession, let us go to work in earnest. I maintain that among the popular delusions of the day, there is no one more dangerous nor alarming than that which leads our People to believe that they constitute a republic and that they govern themselves, merely because they are allowed to choose their own masters; _provided_ they choose them out of a particular class—that of the lawyers. At the opening of every great political campaign, we hear a great deal about the privileged classes; the ruffled-shirt and silk-stocking gentry: and sometimes men prattle about the aristocracy of talent, or the aristocracy of wealth—but who ever heard any complaints of our legal aristocracy—an oligarchy rather—for they make all the laws, they expound all the laws, and they hold all the offices worth having—in perpetuity. And whose fault is it? If the People are such asses, why should they not be saddled and bridled, and ridden in perpetuity? It is their nature. They are prone to class-worship, and to family-worship—to self-depreciation, and to a most incapacitating jealousy of one another. Even in the day of the elder Adams, it was found that the office of a justice of the peace, like that of a legislator, was well-nigh hereditary in New England. Having anointed the father, how could they help anointing the son?—or the daughter’s husband, if the father had no son?