recluse in their chambers,
maintained the dignity of legal professors, by furnishing a rich client
with subtleties to confound the plainest truth, and with arguments to
color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class
was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of
their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice,
they are described for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides,
who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of
disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were
at length dismissed when their patience and fortune were almost
exhausted."[35] Is not this probably the history of the decline of the
profession in all countries from an honorable office to a money-making
trade?

It is the established law of England, that a counsellor or barrister
cannot maintain a suit for his fees.[36] There is in that country a
class of mere attorneys, who attend to legal business out of court, who
bring suits and conduct them up to issue; but who are not allowed to
speak in court. This latter privilege is confined to serjeants and
barristers. Attorneys are regulated by statute, and are subject to many
restrictions; having a rate of fees, settled either by statute or
established usage; and required to be fixed by the taxation of an
officer of the court before a suit can be brought for them. Barristers
are admitted only under the regulations established by the various inns
of court; and the serjeants, who long had the monopoly of the Bar of the
Common Pleas, are appointed by patent from the king. A barrister cannot
be an attorney.[37]

In this country, there is in general no distinction between attorneys
and counsellors. The same persons fulfil the duties of both. Hence no
difference is made between their right to recover compensation for
services in the one capacity or the other.[38] In Pennsylvania, it was
held at one time that an attorney could not recover, without an express
promise, anything beyond the trifling and totally inadequate sum
provided in the fee-bill. That pure and eminent jurist Chief Justice
Tilghman thought that the policy of refusing a legal remedy for anything
beyond that had not been adopted without great consideration.[39] He
stands not alone in the opinion that it has been neither for the honor
nor profit of the Bar to depart from the ancient rule.[40] It has been
departed from in this