tended and as
learning spread from the clergy to other persons, opportunity and
inducement were furnished for the study of the law, and professional
training became more general. The crying need for a learned and
honorable profession of the law was made manifest by the growth of a
class of advocates and advisers whose influence was most pernicious.
Litigants needed guidance in the presentation of their cases and no
learned profession being available, the underbailiffs, undersheriffs,
clerks and other underlings of the administration of justice began to
practice, without real knowledge. Greedy and lacking in principle, they
developed trickery and stirred up litigation for their own profit, just
as their predecessors had done three hundred years before in England.
Colonial statutes were then passed, forbidding such underlings of the
court to practice law at all. But lawyers were not popular in colonial
days even after the Bar became able and respectable. In fact a bitter
spirit was manifested against lawyers even as late as Shays's Rebellion
after the Revolutionary War.

Between the years 1750 and 1775, more than a hundred and fifty young men
from the colonies were admitted to one of the four Inns of Court and
became educated lawyers with the purpose of entering the profession in
their native colonies. How far the presence of such a class of educated
lawyers through the colonies contributed to the resentment against the
stupidity and injustice of the English colonial policy which brought
about the Revolution, cannot be estimated exactly; but certain it is
that the preparation of the lawyers who were then in their prime appears
to have been Providential interference in behalf of the people of the
United States. Never in history has the profession of the law received
so great a harvest of profound students of the constitutional principles
of government as did our country at this time. Our lawyers signed the
Declaration of Independence, served in the Continental Congress, acted
as delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and met in the various
conventions called by the states to consider the ratification of that
great instrument. They not only knew that common law, but they had
studied closely the political history of Greece and Rome, and were
familiar with the principles of government as set forth by Montesquieu
and Adam Smith.

It was the American Bar that gave to the people of the United States
such lawyers as Alexan