is the data that will justify the assertion that the corrupt and incompetent will be found in larger proportion among those who had but a common school foundation for their professional studies? It will not do to plead the almost impossibility of securing such data. This might excuse ignorance; it will not justify assertion. Nor is the burden of proof to be met by mere a priori intendments in favor of the high school or college training, assuming other things to be equal.

Other things never are equal in this world, and the average man, like the economic unit of which we hear so much, is an abstraction, not a person. Some have gone so far as to hint that the output of the night school, having a twoyear course and requiring nothing more than a common school education, is responsible for the ambulance chaser and other professional undesirables. It may be permitted to suggest, in this connection, that it is only since the typical association school of jurisprudence quite recently abandoned the practice of admitting students irrespective of preliminary bookwork, and of awarding the bachelor's degree at the end of the second year, that the bar, which survived these practices for half a century, began to degenerate very alarmingly as soon as these schools raised their standards of admission. It would seem to an impartial mind that a fairer inference could be drawn from the coincidence of the undignified race between the damage suit lawyer and the claims adjuster to the house of mourning and the hospital casualty ward, with the introduction into our crowded cities of the rapid transit juggernaut. It is only in his outward seeming, and his favored field of operations, that the shyster of yesterday differs from the shyster of today. Dodson and Fogg, of happy memory, and Quirk, Gammon, and Snap, are immortal types.

The circumstance seems, however, to have been overlooked by those who urge a high school or college course as a panacea for these ills, that the most widely pernicious activities of the lawyer have been in a field where the best talent will be secured at any price, even that of endowing universities and schools of jurisprudence for its incubation.

No one denies the value of college education. On the contrary, except in rare cases when his time may have been more profitably occupied, every lawyer would be the better for it. The time is passing, however, when fragments of the alphabet appended to the surname will be accepted as a guaranty of moral superiority, or a diploma lend dignity to the really cultured or protect pretence from deserved ridicule.

Of the successful practitioners, onehalf, perhaps, started their professional careers without the advantage of a college or even a high school training. Of the 15,000 young men in the American law schools, perhaps an equal percentage are deprived of these preliminary advantages. Is the bar, as a whole, or are these thousands of candidates for admission to its ranks, to be told that the bar is decadent, and that arbitrary, inelastic, and un-American barriers are to be erected against them in the name of legal reform? It is, to say the least, disingenuous, to agree that we should hold fast to the principal that every young American should have a chance to become a first-rate man, when by that you mean a well-to-do father, able to support him at a distance from home and at considerable expense, during an unproductive period. which you tend rather to lengthen than curtail.

The only excuse for such a position. would lie in the fact, if it were a fact, that in no other way are first-rate lawyers ever turned out. Is the bar to be

asked seriously to accept the suggestion that botany or embroidery, elementary algebra or a bowing acquaintance with a modern language, even Latin or the prevalent philosophy of Cant, will prove an inhibition to the impulse to chase ambulances or reorganize helpless minorities out of their holdings?

By some it has been thought that character is best tempered to withstand the shock of worldly temptation by early participation in the struggle for existence, which, as Huxley has remarked, goes on as relentlessly beneath the polished surface of modern society, as among the wild inhabitants of the woods. Because others assert that character is best upbuilt during the sheltered life, is the bar to be asked to assume that the mature, self-supporting, and sometime family-supporting, young man is at any disadvantage in this particular with the high school or college graduate, merely because the former has had no opportunity, during early life, to study such classic models of combined culture and morality as the Hetairia of the Greek academies?

The duty of the bar is plain. Its concern is not with the competition for students between night law schools and schools of jurisprudence. It is not primarily concerned that some thousands of young Americans, plagued with indiscreet ambition, aspire to the gown and even to the woolsack, nor that they may be mistaken in thinking they can do, with only a common school education, some intelligence, and much concentrated industry, what the majority of the American bar, without, in many cases, even the assistance of the night school, has been doing for over a century before it became degenerate. The thing that does. concern the bar, and which concerns it and the public deeply, is that it no longer continue to shirk its duty of testing the moral and professional fitness of candi

dates for admission in favor of the easy, but wholly unjustifiable, method of making intendments in favor of this or that antecedent qualification.

The Three-Year and High-School Certificate Requirement for the Bar Examination.

We have already discussed the liberal education qualification from the moral guaranty standpoint. If nothing is said concerning the value per se to the practicing lawyer of any one or all of the topics therein usually included, it is because no stress is laid upon it by even the most ardent of its advocates. It only remains to view it from the standpoint of alleged indispensible mental training.

Would it not be absurd to say that the man who demonstrates that he has reasonably mastered the bookwork of his profession lacked the preliminary mental training to enable him to do so? If it be objected that examination is a test rather of learning than of ability, this remains equally true of the high school or college examination. It is certainly easier to cram for one or two subjects at a time than for the wide field covered by the bar examination.

Turning now to the three-year requirement:

Is it not equally absurd to require of all candidates the same period, or any arbitrary period, of previous study? The duty of the bar would seem to be to ascertain how much the candidate knows, not how long he took in learning it. If he appear to be sufficiently equipped, no intendments should be made against him; if not, then is illustrated the fallacy of any intendment in his favor based upon the number of months or years put to so poor a use.

Again, will some one please explain the theory upon which precisely the same period of antecedent study in Harvard

law school is required as must be spent in running errands in a law office?

In short, let us substitute tests for these intendments. Let the examination, covering the whole field of the practitioners' duties, be as searching and practical as possible. Let it as far as may be include the drawing of pleadings in proper form and in good English, as well as the preparation of such papers as the young practitioner might be expected to draw without the aid of his library. Let the same sort and the same degree of care to exclude the dishonest be taken by the bar, as a prudent business man uses in the selection of his trusted employés. Let it be for all a fair field and no favor. No one will urge as an apology for these intendments that, in perhaps many cases, they save the examiners unnecessary trouble in examining the papers of the ill-prepared. Assuming that such a reason. would justify the exclusion of a single worthy candidate, the objection is easily overcome. If the fee for taking the examination is made fairly remunerative to those conducting it, the examiner will not complain, and the candidate can more easily defer taking the examination until he can raise this sum than one sufficient to carry him through college.

The Association of American Law Schools.

Unfortunately, no discussion of this subject can ignore the action of the American Bar Association in committing itself, temporarily at least, in favor of these requirements. It seems that the American Bar Association has a committee, or section, on legal education, whose functions are performed by the Association of American Law Schools. It is not unlikely, therefore, the action of the Bar Association represents a more or less perfunctory adoption of a committee report.

The Association of American Law

Schools was founded in 1900 by a number of the important university schools of jurisprudence, and some few others, delighted to be noticed in really distinguished educational circles. ed educational circles. The purpose of this association was announced to be the improvement of legal education in the American law schools generally. The idea was certainly a most commendable one. Much good might have been derived from a congress of all American law schools; their faculties representing all shades of opinion and qualified to speak for students of varying characteristics and antecedents. The value of deliberative bodies lies in the fact that light as well as heat is sometime struck from the friction of opposing interests and opinions. Curiously enough, for some occult reason, the present association, by the adoption of the sixth of its articles of association, excluded from its councils all who were reluctant to agree, in advance, with the conclusions already reached by the charter members. These are the conclusions, representing the existing practices of the association members, which it seeks, through the instrumentality of the American Bar Association, to impress upon the American bar generally.

If these conclusions, in favor of three years preliminary study and a high school or college course, are, when sought to be made of universal application by the entire American bar, wise in themselves, they should not be opposed merely because advocated by an association of schools which think their adoption will result in some advantage to their graduates. Each school knows, better than any outsider, its own problem, needs, and student body. It must be conceded that each school, except perhaps in the case of a state university, supported by the taxes of all classes of citizens, has perfect liberty to choose its own student body from any class, and to adopt such

requirements as it may think will best assure it the material it prefers to work upon. What is not conceded, however, is that any school, or association of schools, is necessarily the best judge of the requirements or character of all students other than its own, or that it has any right to legislate, directly or indirectly, against the demonstrable fitness to begin practice of some thousands of American students whom it declines itself to receive, and whose training school is excluded by article six from representation in its deliberations.

It is the night school that seems the object of a peculiar aversion to some members of that association. Yet if they are to be excluded by arbitrary and inelastic preliminaries from entrance to the association school, where else are the thousands of young Americans, to whom it is reluctantly conceded a chance should be given, to get that chance, if not in the nonassociation night school? If the latter is to be required to be come a pale imitation of Harvard law school, and adopt the same preliminary requirements, what is to become of the mature, self-supporting government clerk or other candidate ambitious to fit himself for the bar? Is it not clear, moreover, if the student finds admission to the night school closed to him upon any terms, except those which would enable him to enter a day school, it can only result in his abandoning the idea altogether, as impractical, or in his entrance into the day school? Is this not in effect asking the night school, which is doing a different work, with a different student body, in a different environment, to commit hara-kari for the honor of having the Association of American Law Schools lay a wreath upon its grave? Such a position lays the members of the association, undeservedly no doubt, open to the suspicion that its objects are not

as altruistic as the premable to its articles. of association would seem to indicate.

The night school need offer to the American people no apology for its existence. It is true that there is hardly a practice, inevitable to the night school, which is not sneered at openly or covertly by some of the dominant members of the association; and this, in almost the same breath in which, out of consideration for the night schools remaining within its organization, the solemn assurance is given that the association is not opposed to the night school per se.

The night school is disreputable because its sessions are not held during the day or even while twilight reigns. Its students are dupes for believing that they can study law and earn a living at the same time. Its faculty are mere bread and butter lawyers or judges, ignorant of the scientific principles of jurisprudence, and too exhausted by the labors of the day to teach effectively in the evening. It does not require its students to spend from two to four years in the other departments of the university of which it forms a part. Lastly, and the most serious dereliction of all, the night school insists upon adapting itself to its local environment and of trying to meet the needs of the young men of its state or city, instead of holding the orthodox view that the student body was created for the benefit of the school. Its students, trained to conduct litigation by those who practice what they teach, do little to lessen this irritation when they successfully compete in the bar examination with the graduate learned in the science of jurisprudence, and much beside, except how to try a case. The night school may be wrong in thinking that a student body of mature age, composed of grown men who have come more or less into intimate personal contact with the world, with

men and things and transactions which constitute the subject-matter of the substantive law, are better material than the 18 year old high school boy, of untried purpose, attending the law school at his father's expense. It may be wrong in thinking that an experience as a bank clerk will better help the student to understand the practical operation in the business world of negotiable paper and the reasonableness of the rules fixing the duties and liabilities of holder, maker, and indorser, than will an acquaintance with elementary algebra or the whole high school curriculum. So with the practical duties of the real estate lawyer, a year in the real estate department of a trust company is worth two spent in conjugating Latin verbs. The night school may again be in error in thinking that its students can survive the alleged inferiority of the ideals of justice common to the mere judge or "bread and butter lawyer," who compose its corps of instruction, to those which are said to inhere in the very atmosphere and tradition "of our university system of legal professional education."

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While it is true in respect of this last modest claim that 16 out of 22 of the delegates at the sixth annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools voted in favor of a practical application of the university ideal, the night school must take what comfort it can from the remarks of Judge Shepard, himself a hard-worked judge teaching in a night law school, which remarks will be found in the printed Report of that meeting.

As said before, however, all this is of no interest to the bar or public, whose legitimate concern is with results that can be tested, and not with a priori intendments in favor of this or that method, school, or other antecedent.

If the local bar associations of some states have overlooked this fundamental consideration, it may, in some cases, be due to the fact that such a view has been consistently urged upon it by an organization admirably combining self-interest with solicitude for the public and professional welfare.

It is time that the lawyer's law schools combined for the protection of the great body of American law students.