The Evansville journal. [volume] (Evansville, Ind.) 1866-1870, 1867-07-09

Yours, truly, HaAJ. Ed. &.
From the New Albany Commercially
d The Legal Deluge.
1t is stated that fully three-fourths
of the young men who have gradual.
ed from u schools and colleges this
summer, intend to commence the
study of the law. There is something
radically wrong in our political and
social system when a profession al
ready overburdened, receives every
year such heavy accessions from the
young men of the country. In every
county town in the land, there are
three times as many lawyers as find
employment. Hundreds of young
men tolerably well educated, are con-
tent to triae away half their lives
about the shops and stores
of dull country villages, waiting
for some thing to turn up, Summer in
and Winter out growing older and
understanding the loafer's brigade
becoming less eel .respectful and
less manly, poorer and prouder as the
years wear away. IF the brain and
bone and muscle now wasting away
in the young aud briefess attorneys
of the country was applied in many
fields where it is much needed, society
and the State would be immensely
benefited. This rush for the legal
profession is one of the singular aud
almost inexplicable things of the age.
Few lawyers ever get rich in their pro-
fession. Nine-tenths of them die
poor, unless they abandon il. Few
ever rise to eminence in it. Nine
tenths of those who remain in it
through life gain hardly a local repu-
tation and are perforce content to
by resorting to makeshifts, clerkships,
notarial and agency business. And
yet hundreds hang on to the profess
sion and their own delusion through
a long life of poverty and ~pinching
want, preferring. to half starve as
half respectable members of a pro-
fession once called learned, rather
than to grow into competence and
affiuence through the trades, the me-
chanIc arts or any purely commercial
business.
Hundreds of men drivel away years
waiting for business as lawyers who
have no fitness nor natural Qualiica-
tons for its practice. Many OF them
have special talent for some branch
of the useful or fine arts in which
pleasure and profit would follow close
after industry and application. Thus
this insane rush for the bar not only
crowds it with useless members,
doomed to disappointment and perjury,
bat keeps the educated youth of the
country from avocations needing fresh
blood and cultured brain. How diff
cult it is to find a good engineer?
Educated chemists are rare. Mineral
wealth, peeping from the soil all over
the country, invites to its scien-
tifc examination and development
fritter away their years l~istess-
ly about dingy law Offices into
which clients seldom enter. We
have learned in this country that ag-
riculture is a science, aggregatipg in
its scope a great multitude Of scien-
ces and arts. A neighboring State
recently desired to appoint an officer
whose duty it should be to investigate
the diseases of our cereals-to ascer-
tain their causes and suggest prevent
ives and remedies, to tell whence and
WY any INC WCCfli, tuc UOTtT. the
curculio, the potato bug, the fly, the
blight, the rust. We have understood
that the idea was abandoned for the
want of any one with sufficient learn
ing on such subjects to take the
place. Farmers are continually
sending their boys to law schools
to make poor pettifoggers, who seem
never to have dreamed that a course
In veterinary surgery and practice
would be far more honorable and pro
ftable-would better suit their inclin-
alton and talent-would benefit his
Ineighbors, enrich himself, and in
crease his fortune. Many a farmer
digs and grumbles over his sterile
patch of ground, planting continually
what should not be planted, and la
Iboriously exhausting the soil, to
whom the slightest knowledge of its
elements and it's chemical wants
would prove a fortune.
When shall we learn to seek that
education best suited to our practical
wants? There is more to be learned
for the benefit of ourselves and of So
|ciety by digging up the roots of the
unknown vegetable world around than
in digging after the roots of languages
sixteen centuries a0o