small.

The numberless transactions of the retail stores in a great city; such
cases of proving that a pair of gloves were sold, delivered, and not
paid for are extremely difficult to prove. The expense and trouble
involved of subpoenaing the different departments and of breaking up
the routine of the store, would prevent the stores becoming clients.
The enormous transactions on the New York Stock Exchange, where a
hundred million dollars' worth of business is reputed to be done in
one day, is entirely on the basis of personal honesty. So far as the
court goes, should one party to a stock sale not be willing to
complete, there would be little possibility of enforcing it. Therefore
the Stock Exchange makes its own rules and has its own method of
settling disputes. The world at large is not a client in the court.
The man who becomes a client in the sense of litigant is an exception.
The courts would seem to be unrelated to the demands of actual
business affairs.

Times have changed since the Victorian days when a solicitor was the
client's deferential servant, the steward and custodian of the landed
gentleman's legal affairs. Then the lawyer had a profession which he
carried in his head. Law reports contained a few thousand, not a
million decisions, and there were no title insurance companies to make
a business of determining the ownership of real estate. Yet in those
days the legal adviser was not a very exalted person, ranking beneath
the soldier and standing hat in hand before the gentleman of property,
to whom he owed his living. The citizen who wished to learn whether he
or his landlord should clear away the snow on the sidewalk, went
gravely to a lawyer's office and paid a fee for the information. It is
obvious that lawyers do not make their living through small fees for