The importance of lawyers as legislators and executives in the actual work of American government has been an indirect consequence of the peculiar function of the Supreme Court in the American political system.  The state constitutions confer a corresponding function on the highest state courts, although they make no similar provision for the independence of the state judiciary.  The whole business of American government is so entangled in a network of legal conditions that a training in the law is the beet education which an American public man can receive.  The first question asked of any important legislative project, whether state or Federal, concerns its constitutionality; and the question of its wisdom is necessarily subordinate to these fundamental legal considerations.  The statesman, who is not a lawyer, suffers under many disadvantages—­not the least of which is the suspicion wherewith he is regarded by his legal fellow-statesmen.  When they talk about a government by law, they really mean a government by lawyers; and they are by way of believing that government by anybody but lawyers is really unsafe.

The Constitution bestowed upon the American lawyer a constructive political function; and this function has been confirmed and even enlarged by American political custom and practice.  The work of finally interpreting the Federal Constitution has rarely been either conceived or executed in a merely negative spirit.  The construction, which successive generations of Supreme Court Justices have placed upon the instrument, has tended to enlarge its scope, and make it a legal garment, which was being better cut to fit the American political and economic organism.  In its original form, and to a certain extent in its present form, the Constitution was in many respects an ambiguous document which might have been interpreted along several different lines; and the Supreme Court in its official expositions has been influenced by other than strictly legal and verbal reasons—­by considerations of public welfare or by general political ideas.  But such constructive interpretations have been most cautiously and discreetly admitted.  In proclaiming them, the Supreme Court has usually represented a substantial consensus of the better legal opinion of the time; and constructions of this kind are accepted and confirmed only when any particular decision is the expression of some permanent advance or achievement in political thinking by the American lawyer.  It becomes consequently of the utmost importance that American lawyers should really represent the current of national political opinion.  The Supreme Court has been, on the whole, one of the great successes of the American political system, because the lawyers, whom it represented, were themselves representative of the ideas and interests of the bulk of their fellow-countrymen; and if for any reason they become less representative, a dangerous division would be created between the body of American public