y an innocent pastime. Leading
lawyers ceased to plead in petit courts to inferior magistrates, and
learned to devise forms of contracts, to lobby in legislatures, or
appear with the great Maryland and Virginia practitioners before the
Federal Supreme Court.

The legal profession of the East naturally made common cause with their
clients. The state courts, already accustomed to curb the democracy of
the time and declare public enactments unconstitutional, when the
interests of property required, as readily joined the new standards. The
careers of Justice Parsons of Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent of New
York, to whom all judges and lawyers of the time looked up as sources of
inspiration, illustrate admirably the common tendency. Everywhere in the
East as in the South "independent" judges asserted the power to declare
laws unconstitutional.

The national courts had undergone the same evolution, except that they
had met with violent opposition in the South and West. In many decisions
from 1792 to 1830 the Federal Supreme Court asserted its authority over
Congress, the President, and the States. In almost all of these
instances the federal judges found the heartiest support from the East.
The great institution over which Chief Justice Marshall presided with
such perfect dignity, and which was not paralleled anywhere else in the
world, lent its support to the interests of the East. If the
constitutionality of the tariff were denied by irate planters, Eastern
men pointed to decisions of the Federal Supreme Court; if the powers of
the General Government under which the industrial or financial interests
of the East operated were questioned, it was easy to find a decision of
Chief Justice Marshall to cover the case. Nothing proved more fortunate
for the leaders of the industrial revolution than the almost constant
support of the federal courts and of the legal profession as a whole.

The compact social life of the industrial towns was still further
reinforced by the clergy. In the shift from a stern theology to an
easy-going religious philosophy, William Ellery Channing was a
conspicuous leader. Harvard had already become a Unitarian center, and
in 1836 the Transcendental Club was organized in Boston with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, a preacher in revolt against the old theology, as one of its
leaders; high-toned men, whose minds revolted alike against the old
Puritanism, the grosser talk of rates of exchange and the building of
c