all the volumes of cases for students' use have been prepared.

The study of law by the study of cases is but the adoption of a method that is universally adopted in all other departments of education-in colleges, in secondary schools, and even in the grades and in the kindergarten. In the kindergarten, the child's mind is developed by object lessons and by learning to do things; in the grades, geography has always been taught by means of maps and globes and pictures, grammar by sentences, the computation of interest and discount by the use of hypothetical promissory notes and problems, and mensuration by the use of surfaces and solids; in the high schools, the sciences are now all studied in the laboratory; in the colleges, the higher branches are imparted by drawing from the student independent thought and research. Even in history, students no longer recite from text-books or accept the statements of text writers on historic facts, but are sent to the original sources and authorities for the purpose of examining them and forming their own conclusions, later to be able to express them in their own way. All this is studying by the inductive method, the building up of general conclusions from particular cases-"the inference of a specific law of causational connection or sequence from the observation and analysis of particular instances," as opposed to the dogmatic and deductive method, where statements are accepted without evidence or argument. I say it is the method in use in all departments of education, from the kindergarten to the graduate department of the university; it is the method of study in vogue in all other professional schools. In schools of medicine, anatomy is studied in the dissecting room, materia medica and the theraputics by the laboratory method, and surgery in the clinics; in the divinity schools, the study of the bible is by the inductive method, analyzing it part by part; in commercial schools, in schools of mechanics, in schools of agriculture, in all other departments of

learning, the inductive method is universally accepted and firmly established.

I received in this morning's mail a circular letter from someone in Washington, asking me to write to our United States Senator and Representative in behalf of an appropriation by Congress for the study of the abnormal classes, the criminal, pauper and defective classes. Is it proposed to establish a school where text-books on anatomy, psychology, sociology and criminology are to be studied? No! the plan is: (and I quote this exactly from the bill itself now pending before Congress). "That there shall be established in the Department of the Interior a laboratory for the study of the abnormal classes, and the work shall include not only laboratory investigations, but also the collection of sociological and pathological data, especially such as may be found in institutions for the criminal, pauper, and defective classes, and generally in hospitals and other institutions.' And in the explanations which accompanied the letter and copy of the bill, I found the following: "The greatest of all studies is that of man himself as he is today. A scientific investigation of man must be based primarily upon the individual, who is the unit of the social organism. If we are ever to have sufficient definite knowledge of living human beings that may become a science, it can only be done by the careful study of large numbers of individuals. The study of man, to be of most utility, must be directed first to the causes of crime, pauperism, alcoholism and other forms of abnormality. To do this the individuals must be studied. As the seeds of evil are usually sown in childhood and youth, it is here that all investigation should commence, for there is little hope of making the world better if we do not seek the causes of social evils at their beginnings."

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This is still the inductive method, accepted without argument for the advanced study of a social problem. It is the same method that is adopted in every step of

education and investigation, from the kindergarten to the professional school, and now adopted for the study and investigation of problems in a still broader field.

Why, then, is argument necessary in support of this same method in the study of law, where more than anywhere else in the professional world is needed the most logical analysis and the keenest grasp? Argument is not necessary, except with those who either do not understand the system, or else, understanding it, believe more in the infallibility of certain legal classics than they do in the development of the legal mind and logical grasp of the individual who is about to enter the profession.

We are told that "the principal end of all education is training; that the mind is chiefly developed in three ways: By cultivating the powers of discriminating observation; by strengthening the logical faculty of following an argument from point to point; and by improving the process of comparison, that is, the judgment."

Now the object of a legal education is not the mastery of a certain amount of law in the abstract. The purpose of the school of law, and of the practitioner, who takes an apprentice into his office for study, is not to teach a certain amount of law; but the object and purpose is the development in the student of a legal mind, to give him legal training. The lawyer needs, more than any other man on earth, the power of discriminating observation; the logical faculty of following an argument from point to point; and the improvement of the process of comparison, that is, a development of the judgment. A lawyer must be able to think for himself, and the more you put into him the power of original thought, the more you make of him a lawyer instead of a machine.

When we were young students in the common schools, the use of a key to the problems in arithmetic, algebra and mechanics was discouraged-even prohibited. The student who in mathematics works with

a key and in Latin horses his translations will learn some mathematics and some Latin, but he will diminish his power of original thought and he will acquire none of the mental training and discipline that are the objects of his educational labors.

The law student who studies merely the results of the cases, as he finds them tabulated in the text books, will learn some law, perhaps enough to enable him to pass his bar examination, but he will not be made a lawyer that way; he will not thus acquire a legal mind, the power to discriminate, the logical faculty of following an argument from point to point, the improvement of the process of comparison, that is, the judgment. Ten or fifteen years later may find him a great lawyer. Yes after he has entirely forgotten the abstract rules that he once learned and has acquired his power to discriminate and his logical faculty and his judgment in another way; perhaps by means of the hard knocks that he received during his first few years at the bar, but more likely by the cases which he has read and learned to analyze and discriminate since he was admitted to the bar.

The cases are the original sources of the common law. If judges have at any time followed rules found in text-books, the text writers before them extracted their rules from the decisions of cases. In the study of a text-book, the student learns at second hand the rules which others have formulated from the cases, without himself going through the process by which they were reached, but the rules mean little to him because they are mere abstractions. Call here the average young man of nineteen just graduated from a good high school and set before him paragraph after paragraph from the best text-book, written for beginners by the best and plainest text writers, and ask him to read it carefully and tell you what it means; and he either can not explain its meaning at all, or else, if he seems to grasp it at the time, give him a hypothetical statement of facts a week later, just as the business

men and suffering widows will tell him their stories when he has practiced at the bar ten years, and he will not be able to apply the abstract principles which he has read to save his soul. Those paragraphs are formulated from the decisions of cases. Let the student read the cases himself and abstract the principles and analyze and formulate them; not read an abstract statement written by a text writer, but read the cases that the text writer read and make a text for himself. It developes his legal mind and enables him to grasp and grapple with each new question as he meets it.

The study of cases is the study of particulars. It is particulars that the lawyer will always study. The study of text-books is a study of generalities, a study of vague general statements. If they take root at the time, they pass out of the mind long before any occasion comes to apply them; and even if they stayed by, they would generally be found inapplicable to the specific case in hand.

The student is to read cases which are at variance with one another-and not merely those which the instructor may deem correct in principle. The student should get the principle from different points of view and from men of varying opinions, whether the decision be generally accepted as good law or not. He will be told or he can easily ascertain what is according to the weight of authority, but he should analyze and compare the conflicting cases and discriminate between them. He should do this work before he goes into the class room, where he is to express his opinions and have them reviewed and criticised by other students and by the instructor. This develops in the student the power of expression and is an incentive for sound thinking. His grasp is developed, he learns to analyze and to summarize, and he learns what the law is by studying the steps by which it has grown, and the reasons why it is.

Out of every one hundred that enter the legal profession only a bare quarter of them will ever make