less text-books, parading as the legitimate offspring of Langdell of Harvard. One word more, in which we take the liberty of dogmatizing a little. A case means to a practicing lawyer one of two things: A case is either the phenomena presented to him by his client along with his retainer, in which event it is the case as it exists in a state of nature, susceptible of solution by the application of the correct principles which underlie rules of conduct formulated by custom or legislature; or, it is the case as it exists in nature disguised, sometimes beyond the possibility of recognition in the synthesis of actual practice and more or less perfectly embalmed in the transcript of record. In no event is "the case" the opinion of the appellate tribunal, except, perhaps, in the opinion of the legitimate offspring of the casebook system, the case lawyer.

One further word, added to the above, which is intended not as an argument to exhaust at once the subject and the unwary reader, but as a suggestion only. A real case system is possible, and is followed very successfully in a few textbook schools. We have seen that to the practitioner a case is either a controversy the solution of which depends upon the correct application of legal principles to provable facts, or it is the synthesis of the various activities of the lawyer, whether as a pleader, a trial lawyer, and a careful and astute practitioner, as they are found to be grouped and co-ordinated in the transcript of record. The lawyer's first function is quasi-judicial in applying principles to facts; his second regards the technique of the profession. The student should be taught to reason for himself, to solve problems or cases presented to him by his client; he should then be trained in the technique of the law. In both of these respects a real case system may be employed to great advan

tage. Instead of being given fragments of already solved leading cases (if, by the way, there can be said to exist more than a handful of really leading cases that have not been whittled away to nothing at all) and left to consult them, the student should be given real or hypothetical cases, the more condensed the better, especially at first, and these he should learn to solve at first hand under the guidance and direction of the trained lawyer who is assisting him in or out of the law school. To change Judge Sharswood's famous statement, it is not so hard to find the law; the real difficulty is in applying it. Imagine teaching arithmetic by giving the student a large number of solved problems to study and tell him from these to deduce the principles.

For the technique, a properly organized and conducted moot court is the prac tical means of instruction. The absence of adequate moot court and practice. work in many of our law schools is perhaps a natural consequence of the tendency to divorce legal instructions from any suspicion of fitting the graduate to practice his profession. Of course the intelligent student will survive the case system and in the end acquire a very fair 'foundation, and if the student body is very select the result will be in harmony with that fact; but the results to which it is usual at college commencements to point with pride are more often creditable to the student than to the system of instruction provided for him. The great "American Educational Humbug" has pretty well spared the law schools in the past. For Heaven's sake let us not tempt his appetite too far by the employment of such phrases as the "case system which induces self-activity," or by calling a law library a "laboratory for analytical and synthetical legal chemistry."

Attorney and Client.

By F. CHARLES HUME, Jr., of the Houston, Texas, Bar.

A

N after-dinner speech delivered at the banquet of the American Bar Association, at Seattle, Washington, August 28, 1908. This is the second time Mr. Hume has been called upon to respond to toasts at the banquets of the Association. The notable dinner speech, "The Young Lawyer," delivered at the St. Paul meeting two years ago by Mr. Hume, is still fresh in the memory of the legal profession.

Mr. Toastmaster, Brethren of the Bar,
Ladies, and Gentlemen:

I place no tariff on good fellowship, and no espionage over its symptoms. I recognize no necessary incompatibility in work and recreation. And if to speak on this occasion without restraint-of time or judgment-is to imperil my rightful claim to substantial professional consideration and ability, then I now, for the second time, fearlessly assume the risk of being outlawed through being

underestimated and misunderstood.

I am grateful for this honor. My gentle, unsuspecting spirit accepts and indorses all compliments without recourse or misgiving. This added laurel to my resplendent brow comes as no surprise. It is usually the expected that happens when one's friends pull the wires of opportunity. For my friends, like myself, are optimists-always looking for the best of it. And therefore I am here, before this goodly company a lawyer among lawyers-to point a moral and adorn a feast in fatuous flights of windy suspiration.

Seldom has this coveted privilege been twice accorded an oratorical desperado.

And the fact that you have been willing

to forget the past and grant me another chance to sound "the call of the wild." is a tribute, not only to myself as a public futility, but to your own temerity and blind faith in my pretensions-a signal triumph of hope over experience.

My friends, you will never precisely ascertain how much, if anything, it means to me, or you, or to posterity, to address again this ponderous council of intellectual giants; the greatest lights. that ever shone on land or sea. I say this to your faces, here and now, the eyes of the world upon us, without the slightest fear of contradiction; not, forsooth in idle, maudlin flattery, but be cause, loving the truth, you rejoice to hear it.

I glory in the attributes of greatness. We all do-in our own. On a former trial before this august tribunal, I established, upon my own uncorroborated testimony, my pre-eminence as a lawyera personal judgment whose validity none of you has ever attacked, or even se riously considered. As for me, it is res adjudicata; for I realize that nothing I could say to you now, in my own behalf, would add a single cubit to my professional stature.

You can not misconceive my attitude. For, my brethren, together we compose a broad-minded, sympathetic profession

always commending ourselves most highly to the public respect and confidence, giving credit wherever due and taking it wherever we can get it, "touching the community for its ennobling," and seeking not the bubble reputation

How flat and stridulous doth roll the jejune ly the gist of the action-as it very raresound;