The Bar Associations, which first began to start up soon after
the Civil War, have been of great service in upholding the honor
of the profession. Their Constitutions generally name this
particularly as among their professed objects. One
State[Footnote: Alabama] has recently under such influences,
passed a statute making it a misdemeanor for an attorney to send
out "runners" to solicit practice, and requiring the public
prosecuting officer to institute proceedings for any violation of
the law, upon the complaint of the council of the State Bar
Association.

The steadily and rapidly increasing proportion of lawyers to the
population in the United States necessarily tends to a lowering
of their average professional income, and this tendency is not
fully overcome by the increase of the wealth and business of the
country. The principle of the concentration of industry also
works against the great majority of them. Searching titles to
real estate, for instance, was until the last half of the
nineteenth century part of the business of every lawyer. It is
now in the larger cities monopolized by certain firms or
corporations, who own copies or abstracts of the public records,
laboriously prepared, which give them special facilities for
doing the work rapidly and well. So collecting uncontested debts
was formerly the staple of many a lawyer's practice. The general
abolition of imprisonment for debt about the middle of the
nineteenth century rendered the process much more difficult and
the fees less, and of late years great collection agencies,
generally corporations, have sprung up, with an extensive system
of correspondents among members of the bar, by whom most suits of