the practical difficulties in the way of the establishment and maintenance of what is called "legal aid." Whether the problem presented by the administration of justice among the very poor should be met along the lines followed on the continent of Europe or on lines developed by such a society as the New York Legal Aid Society is for my present purpose immaterial. The striking fact remains that the community has to face this problem of legal administration without the aid of any legal professional organization. It never occurs to our Bar Associations that this is their problem, and that they owe a duty to the community to try and solve it.

Instances might be multiplied, but I think those that I have given prove my point, which is that our failure as a profession to perform what I have classified as our public duties is due principally not to external conditions, but to a total absence of any idea that there exists any obligation on the part of the Bar towards the community. As a profession, we lack any idea of responsibility which cannot be classified as a duty towards a court, a client or a fellow lawyer. The lawyers have, as a class, a real sense of duty towards clients, but little or no sense of any duty towards the community as a whole, for the better administration of justice. We are in exactly the position today that the medical profession would be in if they assumed that action by medical societies should as a matter of course be confined to problems connected with the cure of disease, and that they had nothing to do as organizations with the prevention of disease by communities, and no position of leadership which it was their duty to assume in matters pertaining to the general health of the community.

The same medical profession which a hundred years ago was recognized as a profession, only to cast a shadow on the social position of those that followed it, is today performing its functions to the satisfaction of the community. When the history of the present time comes to be written, it is likely that the reforms and advances in the science of the protection of communities from disease will be cited as one of its chief

glories. Why this success in the performance of public duties where we are failing? It is not in individual character or ability. Man for man, we are as able as they, and as moral as they. Is it not rather that they have developed, in a way we have not developed, an ideal of communal responsibility? Or, again, do not our English brethren of Bench and Bar perform the function of the administration of justice better than we do, and to the entire satisfaction of the community, not because they are better lawyers, but because they possess, in a degree that we do not, a sense that they are members of a profession which has active public duties to perform?

Assuming that I am right in saying that we are failing as a profession, in this country, in the performance of services which the community have a right to expect that we will perform, and that this failure is along the line of our public, as distinguished from our private duties; and, furthermore, assuming that this failure to perform our obligations to the community as a whole is due to the almost total absence of any conception that we have any duties of this character, it becomes a task of no great difficulty to show that the absence of any feeling of public responsibility among the members of our profession is due to defects in our legal education.

We have three systems of legal education in this country— the office system, the night school system and the university law school system. The first needs no explanation. By the night school system I mean that system which prepares a man for the Bar by having him attend law classes, the requirements being arranged on the assumption that the student pursues some other occupation during the period of his attendance. Many such classes are connected with universities, but this fact does not make the system a university system of instruction under the above classification. By a university system of legal education I mean a system which requires the student to be in residence at a school which maintains not only class rooms, but a library for study; which has not only lectures on law, but a resident corps of

men devoting their lives to legal teaching and research, and which demands of their students, by occupying their entire time, exclusive devotion to the work of the school.

It is not my present purpose to go into the relative merits of these three systems from the point of view of the preparation which each gives for the work of a lawyer in the conduct of litigation. My present purpose is to point out that each fails to produce lawyers who come to the work of their profession with any idea that the profession, as such, has public duties to perform. That the office system and the night school system should fail in this respect seems the inevitable result of the ideals which keep these systems alive. The system which permits a man to come to the Bar after a period of registration in the office of a practitioner of his own selection is based on the idea that all that lawyers, as such, need to know are the matters which come up in the private practice of the law. This very conception negatives any idea that the profession has any public duties to perform in the sense in which I have used the word public. The office system assumes that taken as a whole the profession has nothing to learn; that the skill, knowledge and morals of the average member of the Bar in active practice leave nothing to be desired. For it is to be remembered that it is with the average member of the Bar of any community that the office students as a class register, not with the best or the worst. If the average is good in ethical conduct, the student result will in that respect be good. If the ideals of the practicing Bar taken as a whole are low, the ideals of the student product will be low also. As well may a man try to raise himself by his boot straps as to have a profession elevate itself morally or intellectually by such a system. If, as in England, the student registered in and became at once a part of a strong Bar association, organized for the purpose of maintaining and uplifting professional standards, then we might expect progressive improvement from generation to generation; at least in moral tone if not in intellectual equipment. But under the office system, as we know it in this

country, no improvement is possible. The best proof of which statement lies in the fact that while for generations this system has been the recognized system for preparation for the Bar, no marked improvement in morals or efficiency has taken place, if indeed, as many contend, there has not been a deterioration. That the night school system fails to produce a class of men who, however honorable they may be as individuals, fail to grasp the fact that the profession has obligations to the public to perform is also inevitable. There are many night schools created and maintained by charlatans for the fees. Were they all of this class even our ill-organized profession would have prevented their filling the nominal ranks of the profession with their dupes. The system taken as a whole is maintained, however, not by charlatans, but by those who have the interest of the profession sincerely at heart. As a system of legal education, the night school system is a grotesque perversion of what at bottom is an idea on which much of our progress as a nation depends. This is the idea that every man should have a chance to enter any occupation he desires. Here are a host of poor young men. They wish to be lawyers; it is assumed, and doubtless correctly assumed, that many of them will never come to the Bar if they are obliged for three, or even two years, to devote their entire time to legal studies. Ergo, some means must be found to get them to the Bar without requiring their whole time. If we cannot fit them very well, we will do the best we can. And so nearly all our large cities witness overworked lawyers and judges of our highest courts sacrificing, sometimes for good pay, but often for little or no compensation, one or more of their evenings each week, in order to instruct young men in the rudiments of law, who in the daytime are engaged as stenographers, clerks in government and private employ and in other occupations. A night school here and there may try to give something not required by the Bar examination of the state in which it is situated, but the very conception which lies at the root of the whole system predestines to failure all such efforts. That con

ception is-w -we must not ask of the young man who desires to be a lawyer too great a sacrifice. The important thing is to get him to the Bar so that he may have a chance.

And may we not say in passing that the idea that every man should have a chance is a good one. Let us hold fast to it. But remember that the chance to which you or I or anyone is entitled is the chance to become as good and useful a member of the community in the line of life which we elect as we are capable of becoming. It is not a right to a chance to become a second class man when we have it in us to develop into a first class man. To be specific, we have not the right to a chance to become any kind of a lawyer with any kind of ideals, but a right to a chance to become intellectually the best lawyer we are capable of becoming; and morally, for we have a right to a moral as well as an intellectual opportunity, the right to a chance to come to the Bar with those ideals of our professional obligations which will lead to the efficient performance of our moral duties towards clients, the court and the community.

Let us now turn to our university system of legal professional education. The profession is justly proud of the work of several of our leading university law schools along purely intellectual lines, especially their work in common law and equity. Situated at seats of learning, many of which are old enough to have "traditions," and an "atmosphere," one would imagine that students would be instilled with professional ideals which would lead them as a class, not only to have a lively sense of their duty to maintain and see that others maintained the highest professional standards in their relations to courts and clients, but that they would also realize the public functions of the profession, and be alive to those general problems of the administration of justice which the community have a right to expect that the profession make an earnest effort to solve.

I think we may admit that the students of our best university law schools do graduate as a rule with a high sense of their personal obligations towards courts and clients. This is partly