Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/297

 268

Mr. Chewett commenced his address as follows : — "Gentlemen, — Mr. Dawes in his address to the students of the law makes the following observa tions : ' Of all the liberal professions there is not any so difficult to study as that of the law. Those young gentlemen who are intended for it, after they have quitted an university or academy, are either impeded in their researches for want of a proper instructor, or they are affrighted from them by the glowing appearance of a black-letter folio. Resolution and industry may have over come many disadvantages, and time with perse verance may have produced good lawyers; but the greater number of students feel their weakness, and forbear a profession in which with the assist ance of a tutor they might have shone with lustre and gained honor and emolument. Many men who have travelled the wilds of law without a guide to direct them, have been called to the bar in hope of business, and there experienced truth, that serious truth, ' that many are called, but few are chosen.' What they have acquired is perhaps undigested and without system. They have either accustomed themselves to use less oratory and be come speakers of infinite nothing, or they have turned over the pages of an experienced commen tator before they have read an elementary writer, and, lost in the mazes of legal knowledge, they have raised a barrier against it, which even after they are unable to pass; while on the contrary, had they trodden the paths which a preceptor would have marked out for them, they might have come forward and made themselves useful." The burden of Mr. Chewett's address was advice to the students to study first principles; he said : " when young men with out any guide plunge into the midst of ab struse cases without having a competent knowledge of first principles, they must make use of fallacious reasoning, and con sequently run into error." Mr. Chewett in his address endorsed the opinion of Mr. Dawes, that for a student successfully to combat the intricacies of the law with which he has to battle, he should have an instructor to assist him in the habit of arranging his ideas on points of law, speak ing in public and making them useful.

The quotations I have made sufficiently de monstrate that in the early part of the century the Law School idea was firmly fixed in the minds of those engaged in the practice of the law. The cases argued and questions discussed by the students — members of the Advocates' Society, with a Bencher to super vise and control — gave their proceedings all the appearance of a Moot Court and judi cial deliberation. Turning now again to the requirements of the Law Society in regard to candidates for admission to the Society as students, and the knowledge they were expected to possess before entering upon the study of the Law, I find that on the 1st July, 1825, the Convoca tion of Benchers passed this resolution : "Whereas no small injury may be done to the education of that portion of the youth of the country intended for the profession of the Law, by confining the examinations to Cicero's Orations, and it is advisable further to promote the object of the 16th rule of this Society, passed and approved of in Hilary Term, 60 Geo. Ill : it is unanimously resolved that in future the student on his examina tion will be expected to exhibit a general knowledge of English, Grecian, and Roman History, a becoming acquaintance with one of the ancient Latin Poets, as Virgil, Horace, or Juvenal, and the like acquaintance with some of the celebrated prose works of the an cients, such as Sallust or Cicero, Dc Officiis as well as his Orations, or any author of equal ce lebrity which may be adopted as the standard books of the several district schools; and it is also expected that the student will show the Society that he has had some reasonable proportion of mathematical instruction." Up to this period of our legal history, attention had been paid more to the preparatory and initiatory exercises than to the study of law itself. True there had been the "Advocates' Society;" but it had not a long existence, and seems to have expired altogether before the beginning of the year 1825. Students were left to grope the best way they could through the labyrinths of the law, with