Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/200

172 172 HARVAJ^D LAW REVIEW. suggestions of what had already been done at Oxford. The old method of office apprenticeship was not broken up. The profes- sion was extended with Blackstone's Commentaries, as if these had done all that could be done and had made the full and final restatement of the law. The student simply added to his ordinary work the reading of these volumes. But the more enlightened members of our profession in England have keenly felt the backward state of things there. One of the greatest of them, Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards Lord Chancellor Westbury, on taking his seat as president of the Juridical Society forty years ago, lamented the neglect of legal science in England and the strange indifference of the profession to the pursuit of it. Lawyers, he says,^ *'are members of a profession who, from the beginning to the end of their lives, ought to regard themselves as students of the most exalted branch of knowledge. Moral Philosophy embodied and applied in the laws and institutions of a great people. There is no other class or order in the community," he adds, " on whom so much of human happiness depends, or whose pursuits and studies are so intimately connected with the progress and well- being of mankind." In enumerating the causes of this failure to appreciate the dignity of their calling, he names as one of the chief of them, *'the want of a systematic and well-arranged course of legal education. ... It belongs," he adds, "to the Universities of England and to the Inns of Court to fill the void ; but for cen- turies the duty has remained unperformed." It still remains very imperfectly performed. But England is moving in the direction that Blackstone pointed, and in its own way will yet solve the problem. Admirable work is going forward there now ; and how full a sympathy the leaders in it entertain for our own efforts is shown by the coming of Sir Frederick Pollock this summer to take part in the exercises at Harvard, on occasion of the celebra- tion of Dean Langdell's twenty-fifth anniversary. He crossed the ocean for that mere purpose, and returned as soon as it was accomplished. On this side of the water, while the training of our profession continued for a long time to be the old one of office apprenticeship and reading, the new conception — new as regards English law — of systematic study at the Universities, has had continuous life, and has borne abundant fruit. If it has. sometimes languished, ^ I Jiirid. Soc. Pap. i.