The Happy Season

My profession was something at variance with these tastes and
feelings. The very idea of law, which presupposes the frequent
occurrence of injustice, engenders, by its practice, a habit of
suspicion. To throw doubt upon the fact, and defeat and prevent
convictions of the probable, are habits which lawyers soon acquire.
This is natural from the daily encounter with bad and striving
men--men who employ the law as an instrument by which to evade
right, or inflict wrong; and, this apart, the acute mind loves,
for its own sake, the very exercise of doubt, by which ingenuity
is put in practice, and an adroit discrimination kept constantly
at work.

I was saved, however, from something of this danger. The injustice
which I had been subjected to, in my own boyhood, had filled me
with the keenest love for the right. The idea of injustice aroused
my sternest feelings of resistance. I had adopted the law as
a profession with something of a patriotic feeling. I felt that
I could make it an instrument for putting down the oppressor, the
wrong-doer--for asserting right, and maintaining innocence! I had
my admiration, too, at that period, of that logical astuteness,
that wonderful tenacity of hold and pursuit, and discrimination
of attribute and subject, which distinguish this profession beyond
all others, and seem to confirm the assumption made in its behalf,
by which it has been declared the perfection of human reason. It
will not be subtracting anything from this estimate, if I express
my conviction, founded upon my own experience, that, though such
may be the character of the law as an abstract science, it deserves
no such encomium as it is ordinarily practised. Lawyers are too
commonly profound only in the technicalities of the profession;
and a very keen study and acquaintance with these--certainly a too
great reliance upon them, and upon the dicta of other lawyers--leads
to a dreadful departure from elementary principles, and a most woful
(sic) disregard, if not ignorance, of those profounder sources of
knowledge without which laws multiply at the expense of reason,
and not in support of it; and lawyers may be compared to those
ignorant captains to whom good ships are intrusted, who rely upon
continual sounding to grope their way along the accustomed shores.
Let them once leave the shores, and get beyond the reach of their
plummets, and the good ship must owe its safety to fortune and the
favor of the winds, for further skill is none.