with the body itself. In all
free governments, of whatsoever form they may be, members of the legal
profession will be found at the head of all parties. The same remark
is also applicable to the aristocracy; for almost all the democratic
convulsions which have agitated the world have been directed by nobles.

A privileged body can never satisfy the ambition of all its members; it
has always more talents and more passions to content and to employ than
it can find places; so that a considerable number of individuals are
usually to be met with who are inclined to attack those very privileges
which they find it impossible to turn to their own account.

I do not, then, assert that all the members of the legal profession are
at all times the friends of order and the opponents of innovation, but
merely that most of them usually are so. In a community in which lawyers
are allowed to occupy, without opposition, that high station which
naturally belongs to them, their general spirit will be eminently
conservative and anti-democratic. When an aristocracy excludes the
leaders of that profession from its ranks, it excites enemies which
are the more formidable to its security as they are independent of the
nobility by their industrious pursuits; and they feel themselves to be
its equal in point of intelligence, although they enjoy less opulence
and less power. But whenever an aristocracy consents to impart some of
its privileges to these same individuals, the two classes coalesce very
readily, and assume, as it were, the consistency of a single order of
family interests.

I am, in like manner, inclined to believe that a monarch will always
be able to convert legal practitioners into the most serviceable
instruments of his authority. There is a far greater affinity between
this class of individuals and the executive power than there is between
them and the people; just as there is a greater natural affinity between
the nobles and the monarch than between the nobles and the people,
although the higher orders of society have occasionally resisted the
prerogative of the Crown in concert with the lower classes.

Lawyers are attached to public order beyond every other consideration,
and the best security of public order is authority. It must not be
forgotten that, if they prize the free institutions of their country
much, they nevertheless value the legality of those institutions far
more: they are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitr