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yield to this temptation are mostly those who have themselves suffered from a similar impeachment, and fancy that they can score a point by turning States' evidence on their own training.
But I have never seen that the effort had more than a very temporary influence in the community at large; and this for obvious reasons.
To begin with, there is very little of this prejudice among the poorer classes in any American community, for these classes are, whether Protestants or Catholics, not yet very remote from the time when they reverenced their clergy, and when this body represented leadership in all the walks of life.
Among the Puritans, as is well known, the colleges existed to train clergymen, and the clergy existed to fill all the posts of leadership.
There was no separate legal profession, for instance; and Chief Justice Sewall—whose racy journals make him the more sombre Pepys of the New England Colonial period—was educated for the ministry and took a seat on the bench by way of collateral pursuit, precisely as he accepted the command of the Ancient and Honorable
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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