Quite honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come
to believe that a sheet of paper soiled with printers' ink and
interpreted by half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in
armchairs, has some inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can
arrest the march of omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this
view of American civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually
been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes, perhaps
directly through the intervention of some president or governor whom
they have had nominated by a convention controlled by their money, or
else, if the judiciary has been elective, they have caused sympathetic
judges to be chosen by means of a mechanism like Tammany, which they
have frankly bought.
I wish to make myself clearly understood. Neither capitalists nor
lawyers are necessarily, or even probably, other than conscientious men.
What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have
been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this
specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of
perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored
them has changed.
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