rs of the petty war of
village vexation. From the moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and
very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow.

The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the
standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves.
Whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers might have been,
(and in many it was undoubtedly very considerable,) in that military
kingdom no part of the profession had been much regarded, except the
highest of all, who often united to their professional offices great
family splendor, and were invested with great power and authority. These
certainly were highly respected, and even with no small degree of awe.
The next rank was not much esteemed; the mechanical part was in a very
low degree of repute.

Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed, it must
evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the
hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves,--who had no
previous fortune in character at stake,--who could not be expected to
bear with moderation or to conduct with discretion a power which they
themselves, more than any others, must be surprised to find in their
hands. Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it
were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination,
would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness? Who could
conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active,
of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into
their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and
unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the
state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private
interests, which they understood but too well? It was not an event
depending on chance or contingency. It was inevitable; it was necessary;
it was planted in the nature of things. They must _join_ (if their
capacity did not permit them to _lead_) in any project which could
procure to them a _litigious constitution_,--which could lay open to
them those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all
great convulsions and revolutions in the state, and particularly in all
great and violent permutations of property. Was it to be expected that
they would attend to the stability of property, whose existence had
always depended upon whatever rendered property