Turning to professional acquirements, these at once divide themselves into practical and theoretical. We may term "practical" those which cannot be imparted by books. There is no real antipathy, or any deeper difference than this, between practice and theory. The present method of giving practical instruction is by requiring the candidate to spend from three to five years in a solicitor's office, and to pass two examinations, of a fairly exacting nature, in the middle and at the end of the course. Of these examinations, the second and most important is virtually in no less a subject than the Laws of England in all their ramifications. The result is, that the student, unless prepared to waste a great deal of time and energy, is driven to seek the guidance of the professed coach. In the majority of cases the articled clerk relies on four months' violent work in London as the principal preparation for the Final examination. Some preliminary reading is no doubt gone through by most—but it is got through in an unsatisfactory way, in evenings or in odd scraps of office time. This leads us to speak of the practical part of the embryo solicitor's instruction-work in a practising solicitor's office.

A solicitor's business is not to teach the theory or the practice of law. The idea of giving systematic instruction to his articled clerks would considerably surprise the average lawyer. There is no obligation on him to give it. He allows the clerk the run of his papers, sets him to copy precedents and to draft conveyances, to write letters and to serve writs, and he takes him in his train to the County Court. Sometimes he may talk to him about points arising out of the duties he has been performing, and these bits of personal intercourse the wise clerk will value. From the senior clerks, too, the latter may get considerable help. But it is all an entirely haphazard affair. It is nobody's business to show the clerk under articles how to turn to account the opportunities he has at hand.

It is needless to point out what a wasteful system this is. To turn a boy from school or college, guiltless of any knowledge of law, into a kind of legal wilderness, and to leave him to make his own paths through it, may be magnificent, but it is not business.

It is sometimes said that the premiums which are charged by solicitors ought to secure that their clerks shall be carefully taught. But this is a fallacy. Teaching, in the strict sense, is not part of the bargain. If the opportunities which an office affords are worth £200, they will remain worth £200 if teaching is afforded as well. And the teaching will have to be charged extra. If it is done by the solicitor, whose business it is not, it will be a great deal more expensive and inefficient than if left to a teacher whose constant work it is. Therefore, the first reform which strikes one as necessary is, that it should be secured that the candidate, before entering on office work at all, should know the elements of law. The multifarious and long-winded Stephen is perhaps the very worst book which one would put into a beginner's hands for this purpose. It is the selected work, which forms the subject of the Intermediate Examination. But far better for the purpose would be a group of the best modern text-books, with a book of general jurisprudence to bind them together. Anson on Contracts. (Stephen dismisses them in one chapter out of four bulky volumes), Edwards or Jenks on Realty, Innes' Introduction to Torts, and Holland or Pollock's Jurisprudence, with Shirley on Crimes, and a simple work on Practice would form an adequate course. It might well be supplemented by H. A. Smith's Equity-a much more intelligible work than Snell's Equity, and more suitable to the tyro. The value of an early introduction to Equity may be questioned. But it is impossible to understand the law of real property without it.

The beginner's notions of law would be much freshened

by such a course being substituted for the monotony of the Commentaries. The whole of this reading should be done preparatory to articles. But there are other matters which the student is, at present, left to pick up in the office, and which might with the utmost advantage be taught plainly by a skilled teacher or from books.

We are not depreciating the value of practical instruction, when we insist that a good deal more than is usually thought possible, can be much more economically and quickly given in the form of theory. The purely theoretical course which has been sketched out above will not enable the student to draw a mortgage: it would be a remarkably curious performance that would be put on paper, if he tried to do so. It will not teach him the worthlessness of a good case, unsupported by good evidence; nor the paramount importance of costs. That is no reason, however, for assuming that the thousand and one such matters of practical detail, which the beginner now wastes his time in groping after, cannot be shortly and succinctly taught at the outset. Take a country office where there is not much litigation :-an odd Divisional Court appeal: Chancery suit or two. The articled clerk is as likely to be misled, as to acquire much real information as to the conduct of business in the Central Office of the Supreme Court. Yet a very fair acquaintance with its working could be given in a few lessons from a capable teacher. The same is true with regard to the drafting of instruments and the use of volumes of precedents. Professional men who are not teachers are apt to assume that their pupils are born with that instinctive knowledge when to diverge from the written word, which they forget came only to themselves as the result of long and assiduous study.

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All these matters, and many like them, could be well and cheaply taught to the novice by the study of books if the proper books existed. They would be better though some

what more expensively taught by professed teachers. As the books do not exist, we must content ourselves with recommending the latter. They are, moreover, absolutely indispensable for the training of advocates.

It might therefore be suggested that the course of pure theory should be followed by a course of theoretical instruction in the methods by which this purely theoretical law is carried out in practice. Eighteen months would not be too short for this, a year being allowed for the earlier course; and fuller study of the pure theory should proceed concurrently. The question arises, by whom can this secondary instruction be given? As we have seen, it is a mistake to look to the office staff for it. Why should it not be the work of the Universities? It may be objected that they are not professional schools. But in one department, at least, they clearly are such that of physic. University teachers might well undertake this part of the neophyte's education. The only danger would be to guard against its becoming too academic. The abolition of examinations would go far to reduce this danger to a minimum.

College life, however, has its drawbacks. Some of these we indicated at the commencement of this article-another is expense. Even if these objections were removed, it is not a healthy state of things which divorces from localities young citizens at a particularly impressionable period of their lives. It would be undesirable for this reason if it were made obligatory for all legal aspirants to leave their native towns as a necessary condition of advancement in their profession. Every centre of population ought to be provided with an efficient teacher who could undertake the charge of its articled clerks. This instructor should initiate them into those mysteries of unwritten knowledge which link the law of books to the law of daily practice-should teach them the use of their tools-should let the pupils conduct mock sales, and negotiate illusory mortgages, and prosecute imaginary

offences. It is only in this way that a real foundation may be laid on which the solicitor may build.

Lastly, we come to what some may think a tardy recognition of the purely practical part of the solicitor's training. So far from undervaluing this in any way, anyone who has the real interests of the legal profession at heart will see in it the crowning stone of the edifice. It is in order that the candidate may be fully prepared to profit by it, that the institutional and secondary stages will, in any rational scheme, be carefully marked off from it, and devoted to preparation of one kind and another. One and a-half years' articles would be enough for such a fully prepared clerk. His services would indeed be distinctly valuable to the office. He would now acquire that polish and confidence which only comes of actual participation in affairs. This period of apprenticeship should only be entered on after a certificate of competency has been accorded by the professional teacher. Such a certificate might carry the diploma of licentiate in law with it, and regulations might be framed admitting the licentiate to the mastership and doctorate.

It may be thought that in this short survey of the subject the writer has fallen into the pitfall of offering suggestions and recommendations. But it was hardly possible to do otherwise, in the process of laying down the requirements of the situation, if these were to be sufficiently emphasized. Recapitulated, they are comprised in the one word, specialization. An early and systematic devotion to institutional reading-a secondary preparation, equally careful and systematic, in less easily attainable knowledge-a final course of work under a master of his art.

Are there any serious obstacles-details apart-in the way of working out such a system? The premiums now paid to solicitors will continue to be paid, or, at all events, principals will secure pupils who will be a valuable help, instead of a nuisance and a source of danger, in the office.