As I have argued elsewhere, the turn of the 19th to the 20th century represented a critical inflection point in the profession, one where it took a decidedly pro- lawyer turn. Elites in the profession partnered with representatives of some of the more established law schools to halt the growth in the ranks of the profession. Throughout the 19th century the main pathway to the profession was through the apprentice system, where one worked for very low pay for a period of years at the law office of a practicing lawyer. This served as a means by which practicing lawyers could control access to the profession: only those lawyers accepted as apprentices could find their way into the profession, and only those who could afford to work under such conditions could even consider it as an option. By century's end, the profession was, for all intents and purposes, exclusively white and male. But a rise in immigration, with more jurisdictions permitting access to the profession through some form of legal education, including schools that offered flexible schedules for working people, meant that the profession was starting to let in immigrants “by the hundreds,” in the words of prominent lawyer and diplomat Elihu Root. Indeed, according to one American Bar Association (ABA) report, given the relatively low barriers to entry to the profession, even the “illiterate foreigner who can hardly read or write English, who wishes to become a lawyer almost as soon as he becomes a citizen, with the lowest ambitions and ideals, who earns his living while studying law as a runner or pettifogger,” could join the profession.