The Columbia Law School of To-day. feet working. Like all stimulating condi tions, it sets in motion both selective and coercive processes — rejecting and expelling foreign natures, bringing those that arc capable of reacting to its stimulus into more perfect conformity with itself. The lazy, indifferent youth, who is studying law because it is the thing to do, or because his father and grandfather before him were lawyers, feels the shock and, with amused surprise, realizes that he must either go with the current or swim ashore. He is in much the frame of mind of the immortal Alice in the land of the Red Queen when she learned that in that country it was necessary to run at the top of her speed in order to stay where she was. So if our student has the blood of heroes and of lawyers in his veins, he so runs as not to be ashamed. Perhaps the earnest student, whether he comes from the college, the counting-room, or the law-office, feels the atmospheric change with an equal surprise, but in his case the process of acclimatiza tion is neither long nor painful. He quickly realizes that he is now, perhaps for the first time in his life, in his proper element, and that the days and years are only too short for the conquests that stretch in a glittering line before him. But it should be said that the surprise of the earnest student is due in large measure to the discovery that-the law is not the dry and uninteresting study that he had forebodingly pictured it to be. A philosopher would have told him — but philosophers are scarce and, like prophets, are not consulted for their oracles by those who know them best — that there are no dry and unattractive studies; that all the fruits of the human spirit are, in a large view, equally valuable and equally attrac tive; that the difference between the Sahara and Omar's rose garden is merely one of treatment, and that the delight of the student in his work will be in exact pro portion (would it not be more accurate to say in geometrical ratio?) to the ardor and
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the manner of his pursuit. So our student learns, what the readers of this magazine have happily long known, that law is of all studies the most fascinating; that instead of being the result of the perverted energy of ingenious minds (as there be some would have us believe), it is the secreted wisdom of human society applied to its current affairs; that it is not a congeries of rules and maxims to be drearily conned by rote and committed indifferently to the memory or the note book (equally valuable in either place), but a body of living principles, first seen in their beginning in the bursting seed, unfolding in bud and leaf and flower before his eager eyes, shaping themselves anew to suit the changing conditions of human society, to be further shaped and developed by his future labors in behalf of his kind. He learns, further, that law is not a mass of learning whose parts are unrelated or but loosely articulated, but a true body of science, every branch of which is in organic relation to every other, the whole of which is instinct with the same life, draws its nourishment from the same wells of ex perience, is in every part the result of the same creative impulse of the human spirit. Law dry, unattractive to a student who studies it in this spirit? The only danger is that this vital chemistry, wherein the spiritual forces of the race are distilled, may be too absorbing, that nothing else may seem worthy of his attention. Such an atmosphere of high endeavor — in which indolence shrinks away, indifference withers and a sense of individual responsi bility and zeal for learning are the controlling influences — could arise only as the response of the student body to the ideals set before them. The spirit in which the student is taught to regard the object of his devotion has been indicated above. His teacher, from a pedagogical point of view, regards the law neither as a body of esoteric doctrine, to whose secret only the elect can penetrate, nor, on the other hand, as a collection of
