THE ASSOCIATION OF THE BAR.

'^N the later colonial chronicles of New York there are few
things more interesting and significant than the organized,
persevering and successful opposition interposed by the
legal profession to the increasing encroachments of the
British crown. As early as 1744 the lawyers of New York entered
into an association to free the judiciary from the exercise of the king's
prerogative. Mr. H. B. Dawson, in his tract on the Sons of Liberty,
traces the inception of that society in New York to the formation of
this primitive " bar association." None of the records of the associa¬
tion (so-called) have come down to us ; and, indeed, it probably never
presented a public character as a formally officered body, but operated
quite spontaneously, the bar as a whole readily following the leader¬
ship of a few active spirits. When, in 1763, the royal lieutenant-
governor, Cadwallader Colden, undertook to enforce his novel dogma
that the governor and council were entitled to review upon appeal the
findings of a jury concerning questions of fact, the bar of New York
was unanimous in resistance to this arbitrary proceeding, and it is an
exceedingly impressive fact that the lieutenant-governor was unable to
find a single lawyer willing to argue his unjust cause when it came to
be judicially tested. This unpleasant experience led him, in his corre¬
spondence with the home government, to assail the " association " of
the provincial bar with much severity. He bitterly complained that
the association set up by the profession of the law in New York was
exercising a most " dangerous influence," which tended uniformly to¬
ward "inlarging the powers of the popular side of government" and
"depreciating the powers of the crown" ; and he suggested energetic
measures for putting an end to the " Dominion of the Lawyers."'

This early combination of legal practitioners in New York bears,
of course, no ancestral relation to the great Association of the Bar of
to-day ; but it is interesting to recall that a century and a half ago the
New York bar assumed, in a united way, public functions very similar
to those which have characterized the transactions of the existing
association from the outset of its career.

The commanding position held by the bar in colonial times was
preserved for more than half a century after the Revolution. Through¬
out all that period the power and dignity of the legal profession were
too well recognized to need special assertion of any kind. The bar in
those days was a public and social establishment of the most eminent

' See pp. 64, 90. of this volume.