Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/451

425 A MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH LEGAL EDUCATION. 425 of assistance. These tutors seem really to be lecturers, not unlike our own ; but instead of giving in the English manner a brief course, and then abandoning the student for months, they give far more continuous and systematic instruction. The lecturers were highly capable, and often distinguished men ; but, as Mr. Pennington said, a tutor taking a student in hand for three years could give much more assistance than a lecturer who sees a man for a few weeks at various intervals during the year. Tuition begins with a year's instruction, which may be by cor- respondence, consisting of twenty-four fortnightly letters. The students are required to serve five years as articled clerks, but a university degree reduces the time to three years. Most such clerks begin at seventeen years of age, and are admitted at twenty- two. The articled clerks serve in solicitors' offices from ten A. M. to six P. M. commonly, with a short interval for lunch, and they pay a premium of from three to five hundred guineas each to the solicitor with whom they are articled. I have no later figures; but in 1892 Mr. Longbourne, formerly one of the Secretaries of the Legal Education Association, testified that there were about 15,000 solicitors practising in England and Wales, nearly 7,000 of them in London. There were about 3,000 of these articled clerks, and during the preceding year 639 stu- dents passed their final examinations and joined the ranks of the solicitors. Evidently the instruction afforded by the new method of the Incorporated Law Society does not do away with the need of private tutoring, for certain London solicitors fill a page of the London Law Times with the advertisement of the advantages which they afford to students seeking to become solicitors, and append lists showing that for a series of years many, and during the last year substantially all, of the considerable honors and prizes of the examinations have been won by their students. The project of Lord Selborne was in a measure revived in connection with the Royal Commission, headed by Earl Cowper, appointed to consider the framing of a charter for the proposed Gresham University in London which should unite and co-ordinate all great interests and functions having to do with higher education in England in one all-inclusive university teaching every branch of human learning. The commission took the testimony of many eminent persons — lawyers, teachers, and judges — on the subject of legal education in England, and on the continent of Europe and in this country. The French and German schools were com-