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77/6' Green Bag.

with the written sheets he went boldly into the class-room, and maintained appearances until his own notes arrived. Another foreign instructor in Economics, of less experience in student ways, once had his notes printed (printing is cheap in Japan), for conven ience sake, in a small pamphlet, half sylla bus, half notes. This he used as the basis of his class-work. But the students objected to this, rebelled, and finally went on a strike. The manager (an exceptional one) gave the instructor carte blanche in settling the diffi culty; but the latter, not wishing to see the school injured by the withdrawal of a whole class, concluded to alter the method of instruction. It is another corollary of the ideal I have spoken of, that the method which most suits the Japanese student is the one which throws no work upon him, but makes him merely the passive receptacle of the thoughts of the instructor. Work, in our sense of the word, is unknown among students. There are, of course, shining exceptions, but these are few. It is not that there is any objec tion to work in itself. It is merely that the traditions of education do not assume it to be a necessary element in the student's duty. Knowledge- is regarded as a thing already in material existence, and capable of being received and stored away, as a curio or a painting is. Education as a process of rigid training is not a part of their notion. Thus the student's work is practically measured by the number of hours in the lecture-room. The (to us) excessive num ber of hours per week in the curricula is on this understanding not unnatural, since otherwise the student would not have enough to do. It will easily be understood, more over, that French and German law is on the whole more acceptable to the students, so far as the process of mastering it is con cerned; for the tempting form in which it is offered to them — that of ready-made abstractions, requiring, apparently, merely the intellectual apprehension of the formula — satisfies their desire for a minimum of

mental effort. When a principle is presented to them in a plain, straightforward formula, they ask for nothing more. Of the exist ence of difficulties, inconsistencies, complica tions, that are involved in its deduction or its application, they have little apprehen sion, unless these are forced upon their notice. I do not know of the continental methods by personal experience. But if we may judge from the published criticisms of Professor von Ihering, the great practical jurist of Germany, German legal education is to-day recognized to be extreme in its abstractness and unpracticalness. The study of the continental law is certainly for Jap anese students at once the most congenial and the most unhealthy. What they need is something to stimulate intellectual effort. To be content with receiving broad generali zations is not merely to be deceived into thinking that one has a practical knowledge of law; it is to lose the mental training which is with us a chief object of all education. I have alluded to the slender ability of students to employ English. This, too, has in part for its cause the general method of education here. In the traditional ideal, memory is everything, ratiocinative facility is nothing; and the influence of this is not yet shaken off". The result is that where sight-memory is involved, as in spelling, one finds surprising accomplishments. But in the constructive work of grammar and syn tax and in the power of expressing thought freely in a foreign tongue there is a certain backwardness. It is needless to say that the work of the foreign instructor of law is greatly hampered. The imaginary case put above, of a club of American lawyers, will partly convey some idea also of the way in which Japanese students expect to control the policy of a school and to arrange the methods and material of instruction to suit themselves. Practically, it may be said, the students have their own way — that is, whenever it occurs to them to have a special way — in every