Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/412

 promptu indignation meetings. “What do we care whether Myers agrees with the case, or what Fessenden thinks of the dissenting opinion? What we want to know is: What’s the Law?”

Did the new teacher himself know the law? He apparently took back in one lecture what he had said in the last. Young Warner, a keen logician (and one of the first converts to the new ideas), cornered him squarely one day, amidst a hurricane of derisive clapping and stamping. Would it be believed, “the old crank” went back to the same point next time and worked it all out to a different conclusion! Most of the class could see nothing in his system but mental confusion and social humiliation. They began to drop away fast.

A little group, the ablest men of the School (most of the names have been mentioned above),—“Kit’s freshmen” they were dubbed,—discerned that there was something here belter than the textbook lectures, and stuck to the ship. They were finding out how the law was made, and the reasons for it, and how it was applied in actual practice. The lecturer was finding it out for himself with them. Every step of the reasoning was being scrutinized and tested and reëxamined till proved right or wrong. The law was being treated as a science, not as a rag-bag of rules and exceptions. In the happy phrase of Professor Gray, the language of the law