greater or less as may be, to what will serve them in that final ordeal. "The college graduates, trained for years in passing ' exams,' are as subject to it as the less schooled, if not from previous habit more so. They mean, of course, to be thorough, to master every topic of a complete legal education. But those on which questions will be asked by the com mittee must come first; when that ordeal is passed they will have leisure enough to accomplish them selves with branches whose only service to them will be in the actual work that follows the obtaining of the license or diploma. "But every lawyer knows how very lightly the subjects of elementary law and all such as require a systematic and accurate knowledge of it are passed, almost invariably, by a committee of law yers taken on brief notice from the busy bar, usually in the busiest days of the beginning of the term, to examine a class of applicants. There is no time to refresh their remembrance of early studies, or to form a careful and just plan of examination. After a very few calls for the definition of this or that term, so put as to involve merely verbal memory, their in quiries are mostly prompted by cases in their recent experience, or by the latest text-books they have read. Too often they are asked almost at random, and deal with a list of scattered points rather than any important and comprehensive doctrine of the law. Almost inevitably they deal with the points contained in recent cases, as most familiar to the questioner; and such law can rarely be elementary or of wide application. The very fact that it has been recently in question shows that the point was not long ago a doubtful one. "To examine a class of students searchingly and yet justly, so as to learn something more of them than their mere recollection of a few book phrases and a certain aptitude for guessing, is not a light task, and requires careful preparation. The United States is about the only nation in the world, we believe, where it is usually permitted to be done extempore; and much of the decline in professional learning and professional character, so commonly lamented, may be traced to this lack of well-trained and vigilant watchmen at the entrance gates. "By entrusting the duty to a continuous body, whose own rank and interest in the profession shall insure their fidelity to the onerous task, and whose sense of responsibility shall be quickened by knowing that the entire trust is committed to them,
and that they alone will be answerable for its due performance, we may hope to secure two most de sirable objects, — a careful and exact but equable test of the preparation made for the bar by every young American who claims his native right to enter a noble profession, and, as a consequence of this, a potent and beneficial influence on the minds of other and future aspirants in favor of thorough and systematic preparation." The report then gives the results of an other circular of inquiry sent to the different law-schools of the country, asking for a detailed account of their organization and method of instruction, the number of teach ers, students, and graduates, etc. Unfortu nately, only sixteen out of a total of over seventy schools thus addressed made reply within the year, and for the statistics given in the report and in the tables printed as an appendix thereto, the committee were obliged to rely chiefly on the returns made to the Bu reau of Education at Washington. As these are generally accessible to our readers in the Commissioner's annual Report (the last pub lished volume of which, however, is no later than 1887-88), we quote only the concluding remarks. After showing that only about one fifth of the annual admissions to the bar are graduated from law-schools even now, while both medicine and theology make a better showing, they proceed : — "The figures given in these tables are instructive, and deserve careful study. They will probably surprise that large class of the community, and even of the bar itself, who think that the law schools have been a chief cause of that overcrowding of the pro fession in this country, which has been such a subject of complaint. There are probably few lawschool teachers who have not heard again and again the remark : ' What in the world will all your grad uates find to do? ' made with the same air of surprise and regret, whether the graduates' class numbers twenty or twenty-five, as in the majority of schools, or is counted by the hundreds, as in a few of them. It is hoped they will correct the impression still pre valent among those least acquainted with the facts, that the increase of law-schools and the methods pursued in them tend to increase the number of
