awakened from their slumbers? Are not all birth-throes painful? Has the Christian conscience ever risen from one step to another of the spiritual life without struggles and suffering?

The Apostolic Church was agitated by a terrible crisis when first Stephen and then Paul, in order to free and to gain the victory for the spiritual and moral principle of the Gospel, proclaimed the downfall of the Mosaic institutions, the nothingness of outward circumcision and legal practices, the independence of the new covenant upon the old. In the sixteenth century came the same crisis of conscience, the same tempest in the spiritual world. And now, for the third time, an analogous crisis is shaking Christendom. It is in reality the third phase of the same conflict; it is the continuation of the ceaseless struggle between the spirit and the letter, between morality and legality. More certainly and with more consciousness of its power, the Christian principle is seeking to free itself from the swaddling clothes of an intellectual formalism, which, having served its time, menaces a conflict between itself and the modern conscience; it seeks to strengthen itself in its pure spirituality and in its liberty as regards the historical formulæ in which it has been bound. Why should there again be alarm or doubts as to the victory? The destinies of the Gospel are not in the hands of man, but of God. crises, that which Christianity is traversing to-day is death but of growth. It depends only upon our faith to reap its

benefits.

Like all former

not a crisis of

A. SABATIER.

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH LAW

AT HARVARD.

YAN English law be taught at the Universities?

CAN

This question was, some sixteen years ago, raised in my inaugural lecture at Oxford. The answer then given, on theoretical grounds, was that English law could be effectively taught at the Universities by duly qualified teachers to duly intelligent students. It is now in my power to assert with confidence that my speculative conclusion is proved to be correct by the irrefutable results of American experience. Wherever the law of England prevails throughout the American continent the best instructed and the ablest lawyers have been grounded in its principles by professors. The schools of New York, of Chicago, of Ontario, of Nova Scotia, of Boston, and, above all, of Harvard, establish the fact, or (as our lawyers of the older school might put it) give plausibility to the paradox that English law can be taught at Universities, and be taught by University professors. On the other side the Atlantic, indeed, the truth of this conclusion is treated as established past dispute. It will further be admitted by every competent judge that nowhere throughout America is law taught so thoroughly as at the University of Harvard. The Harvard Law School has, compared with other institutions of the United States, an ancient history. It practically owes its existence to the labours of Story, and it is a matter of interest to any member of a college where lectures were delivered by Blackstone to learn that Mr. Viner's noble endowment, in its effect on the study of English law, has surpassed the hopes or the dreams of its founder. It led directly to the production of the famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England "; it led indirectly to the prosperity of the Harvard Law School, for, under the influence, as it may be suppesed, of Viner's example, Dana, who curiously enough was, like Viner,

the author of an Abridgment of Law, founded the chair which was first occupied by Story. But though other eminent men aided and followed Story, the restorer, we may almost say the second founder, of legal education at Harvard is Professor Langdell. His labours have been nobly seconded by colleagues such as Thayer, Gray, Ames, and others, all of whom, by their names and by their writings, are known to every educated English lawyer, and have been crowned with complete success. The prosperity and the greatness of the Law School is almost visible. It has, through the fame which has brought to it lavish donations, acquired large pecuniary resources. The Law School forms a sort of University within the University. Its library constitutes the most perfect collection of the legal records of the English people to be found in any part of the English-speaking world. We possess nothing like it in England. In the library at Harvard you will find the works of every English and American writer on law; there stand not only all the American reports-and these include, as well as the reports of the Federal courts, reports from every one of the forty-five States of the Union-but also complete collections of our English reports, of our English statutes, and of the reports and statutes of England's colonies and possessions. Neither in London nor in Oxford, neither at the Privy Council nor at the Colonial Office, can one find a complete collection either of American or even, astounding as the fact sounds, of our Colonial reports. The library meets the wants (which, by the way, are very different) both of trained lawyers and of students. I have dwelt upon the library because it is an outward and visible sign of the spirit of study and enthusiasm which gives life to the Law School. But it is in its students and its professors, in its crowded lecture-rooms and its admirable teaching, that lies the true glory of Harvard. It is a great thing that teachers whose merit is the thoroughness of their instruction should, within the last fifteen years, have raised the number of the students from 150 to about 500, and should find that the one obstacle to further progress and it is, under the Harvard system, a very real obstacle-lies in the number of their pupils. The crowd of learners for the moment almost exceeds the physical capacity of the teachers. But the final triumph of the Harvard professoriate is one of which no one but an Englishman well versed in the traditions of English law can appreciate the greatness. The professors of Harvard have, throughout America, finally dispelled the inveterate delusion that law is a handicraft to be practised by rule of thumb and learned only by apprenticeship in chambers or offices; they have convinced the leaders of the Bar that the Common Law of England is a science, that it rests on valid grounds of reason, which can be so explained by men who have mastered its principles as to be thoroughly understood by students whose aim is success in the practice of the law.

My aim is to expound the conditions and the character of the law teaching at Harvard, and thus explain the causes of its success, and then to consider what are the lessons, if any, which can be learned by our Law School at Oxford from the experience of Harvard.

The Harvard Law School is a professional school for the practical teaching of English law, and is conducted by professors.

This statement embodies a fundamental fact, of which the critic of Harvard should never lose sight; it covers two different points, each of which needs separate attention.

The Harvard Law School is a professional school.

Its classes are attended by men who are B.A.s of Harvard or of some other University, where they have already received an adequate general training. They have not necessarily, nor, as I believe, generally, mastered even the elements of law. In this respect they stand in the position of undergraduates beginning to read for our Jurisprudence School at Oxford. But in other respects the student at the Harvard Law School differs from an Oxford undergraduate. He is a man of twenty-two or twenty-three, who, having passed through his University career, wishes to prepare himself for the Bar; he joins the school with the practical object of acquiring knowledge of law. He is to be compared with a student of an Inn of Court who is eating his terms and beginning to read in chambers, or with a young articled clerk who attends classes at the Incorporated Law Society in order to pass his final examination. At the school our student remains for at least three years, and goes through a carefully prepared three-yearly course. In order to obtain the law degree he must have attended at least eighteen sets of lectures. These sets are arranged so as to meet the requirements of men of each year, though in the latter two years a student is allowed free choice of subjects. At the end of each academical year he is examined in the topics of his lectures by the professor whose classes he has attended, and is not allowed to pass on to the studies of the next year unless he has satisfied the examiner. A degree is obtained by success in each of the yearly examinations, and students who pass with special success have their merits recognised in something like a class list. But, be it noted, the obtaining the degree, and a good degree, is not the student's primary object. What he wants to achieve is to learn English law and to acquire a high reputation for legal knowledge both amongst the professors and amongst his fellow-students.*

The studies followed may be best understood by giving a brief synopsis of the curriculum pursued by a very distinguished student: Year 1.

(1) Contracts.

(2) Torts.

(3) Property. (Real and Personal Estates; Landlord and Tenant, &c. .
(4) Criminal Law.

(5) Civil Procedure at Common Law.

Any man who has mastered the principles which govern the large departments of law to which the attention of students at Harvard is directed, and many of such students achieve this arduous task, undoubtedly begins his professional life with an amount of knowledge rarely possessed by an able barrister on his call to the Bar, and never, as a rule, acquired by any young Englishman when he begins to read in chambers. Yet, though the advantage of such preliminary knowledge to a person who intends forthwith to begin the practice of the law is obvious, the experience of an English lawyer, imbued with the traditions and habits of the English Bar, inevitably suggests a curious question.

How is it that young Americans, who are keenly enough alive to the importance of actual success in the battle of life, are willing, or even eager, to spend three or four of the best years of their lives, say from twenty-two to twenty-five or twenty-six, in a course of preparatory professional study which no young man aspiring to eminence at the English Bar would dream of pursuing? How is it, to put the same problem in another form, that study at a law school is to a young American to a great extent the equivalent of what reading in chambers is to a young Englishman?

It is possible to offer a partial, though not a complete, explanation of what must always to an English critic seem a paradox.

A high law degree, or, indeed, any degree obtained at a University, may be in the United States, as it is in England, of little worth by way of an introduction to business. But a reputation gained at Harvard for extensive and accurate knowledge of law and for dexterity in legal argument may well in America promote a young man's success as a lawyer in a way in which no University reputation whatever can in England foster his success at the Bar. In the United States there exists no distinction between barristers and solicitors, and the combined business of a barrister and of a solicitor is carried on by firms. number, further, of lawyers is immense: it were hardly an exaggeration to say that every man who is not in business or a minister of

The

(5) Jurisdiction and Procedure in Equity. (General principles of unreformed English Chancery Procedure, &c.)