of education shall forever be encouraged;" and the authorities of the University have inscribed those words in glowing letters on their University Hall. This was fitting, for the sentiment is the corner-stone on which the whole University has been reared. It was founded by the State and is maintained by the State, but its students come from every quarter of the globe. During the present year its students are drawn from thirty-five of the thirty-eight States and from five of the Territories, as well as from England, Germany, Russia, Japan, Turkey, Italy, Hungary, New Zealand, Porto Rico, Nova Scotia, Hawaiian Islands, Manitoba, Province of Quebec, Province of Ontario, and Mexico.
The University of Michigan is composed of a College of Liberal Arts, termed the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts; a School of Law; two Schools of Medicine,—the Department of Medicine and Surgery or "regular" school, and the Homœopathic Medical College; a School of Pharmacy; and a College of Dental Surgery. The Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts was first established, but its development was slow. Even in 1850 the Board of Visitors in an official report declared that there were only fifty students at that time in actual attendance in that Department. In 1850 the Department of Medicine and Surgery was established, and in 1859 the Department of Law. The opening of these Departments, although so late in accomplishment, was in accordance with the original plan drafted by the first Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan. It is a significant fact, which has been commented on more than once, that the establishment of the Schools of Law and of Medicine contributed much to a rapid increase in the number of students in the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
If we keep in mind the ideas which have prevailed until recently in reference to legal education, we shall be impressed by the wise foresight and liberal views of the men who shaped the educational policy of the State of Michigan, in that they consented thirty years ago to establish a School of Law in their State University. Not that it is matter for astonishment that the State should consent to tax itself for the education of physicians and lawyers. If the State is justified in taxing the people for public education, if it can tax them to teach the scholar to read the languages of other peoples, to analyze the structure of the flowers, to read the story of the earth as written upon the rocks, no one should question its right to teach the physician to heal the sick, and the lawyer to advise the citizen for the protection of his rights to life, liberty, and property. The State is a means to an end. It is charged with the protection of the public health, and it exists to protect the rights of its citizens and to secure the administration of justice. But the administration of justice is only possible when there exists a body of men trained in a knowledge of the laws, and made competent to administer them as judges on the bench, and as lawyers at the bar to advise the court and counsel the oppressed. If the State can teach anything more than the elementary branches at public expense, it certainly should be able to teach a knowledge of the law. But the wisdom of the people of Michigan in establishing a law school is seen when we reflect that they discarded the old notion that the place to learn law is in a lawyer's office, rather than in a University. A law school was established because it was thought that there the law could best be learned.
Professor Bryce, in his "American Commonwealth," comments on "the extraordinary excellence of many of the law schools" of the United States, and adds: "I do not know if there is anything in which America has advanced more beyond the mother country than in the provision she makes for legal education." The compliment is not undeserved; for every one knows, who knows anything about the history of legal education, that England has been behind almost
