Farmers And Lawyers

Farmers and Lawyers.

Among the other revolutions the farmers' movement is to accomplish in a short space of time is to break up the fetichism which has given the profession of the law prestige in public business. The Alliance has in Kansas, where its advance has been most marked, made congressmen, state legislators and even judges out of other material. It proposes to dispense with lawyers in the competition for the United States senatorship.

Since the time when the professions contained all the education of nations the law has been regarded as the principal source of supply for public men. Young men went into the law as much because it was the stepping stone to political preferment as anything else. The selection of congressmen from any other class has been exceptional in this country. The bar and politics have been almost one and the same thing.

If the Alliance continues to wield political power and persists in its exclusion of lawyers it will either destroy a superstition or do some terribly bad governing. Which will it be?

Education has extended. The farmer and merchant know more of the inside of public questions now than the lawyers and preachers did when the constitution was adopted--not more of technical forms, but more of the essential reasons for this or that legislative or executive action. The trend of civilization is always away from barren technical recital and toward simplified common sense. As people learn more tehy require less and endure less of the elaborate ritual of technique. Perhaps we can get along with few lawyers among public men.--Kansas City Times.