e surface of the placid stream in which for so many
centuries had been flowing the course of justice. Those curious relics
of a medieval, age, the law courts, still at so recent a date,
retained many of the forms, characteristics, and usages of a time
when knights fought in plate armor and indulged in the mimicry of
battle, urged on by the glamor of chivalry. The very terms and the
legal phraseology of the period implied the jousts, tournaments, and
ordeal by battle of a romantic and self-deceptive age.

The universal world war that resulted in such an immense change of
social and economic values contributed naturally to the destruction
and abandonment of old forms and structures. Yet even before the war
and the economic revolution that followed so quickly thereafter, the
tendencies toward a more sane treatment of the question had already
begun.

Like the extinct class of so-called physicians and doctors, who have
now been amalgamated by the Public and Private Health Corporations,
what was known as the legal profession or men known as lawyers and
judges, had been gradually losing their characteristics as a class and
had been step by step merging into men of business.

One of the earliest changes was the disappearance of the lawyers known
as the real estate lawyer. Up to about 1890 there still remained
members of the legal profession who made a livelihood out of the
examination of the titles to real property. The obvious advantages of
a comprehensive title examination plant by large corporations known as
Title Insurance companies soon eliminated this particular subdivision.

The next important change arrived in a curious manner under the cry
for what was then known as Social Justice--a vague term which was then
advocated by many so-called "reformers" and ignorantly opposed by the
capitalist class, without any very clear understanding of what was
meant. So little was realized of the economic and efficiency values of
insurance against chance, that the beginning of the movement was
opposed. The movement resulted in certain obvious changes which
looking back upon them seemed inevitable and natural. This was what
was known as universal Employers' Liability laws. The principle soon
extending itself to all classes of accidents, resulted in the passage
of legislation which had been foreshadowed by the tremendous growth of
Casualty and Accident Insurance companies. Beginning at first with
laws holding the employer liable for