old problem of discriminating the significant and permanent from the transitory and unessential. Which are the things to be preserved as indispensable, and which are to be thrown away as outworn? The difficulty of answering that question may be illustrated by a parable which will speak to any one who has argued before a law court. Suppose yourself to be sitting silent while your associate is discussing the law. You very likely know more about the law of the case than the gentleman who is on his feet such a division of knowledge between senior and junior is not uncommon. The argument proceeds easily until the court puts a question, but the question fills you with a justified terror whether he is going to concede the point or deny it. It is hard to say which is the worst: When he concedes a position that it was essential he should attack or when he attacks what he should have conceded. We have all been there. Of course there is no solution for the difficulty except a knowledge of your case; and you must know it pretty well before you can tell what concessions to make. Just so, to compare great things with small, when our profession is confronted with the legal and constitutional problems of the present day-when we are told that the Constitution is out of date and that the Declaration of Independence contains nothing but outworn dogmas of a past generation-we cannot safely commit ourselves until we know our case.

How are we to know our case? Certainly not without a liberal education-such an education as will produce a cultivated and learned man. Can such questions be answered without a knowledge of economics? Can they possibly be answered without knowing much of history? Without it how can we tell how many of the new things that are set before us are really discredited experiments of the past with no element of novelty excepting the names in which they are dressed? It is idle to hope that the Bar can do the work it is called upon to do-and the community is not slow in calling on us to do many things-unless it is an educated Bar. The talk about equal opportunities for all, and giving the young man a chance, is appealing enough. It is easier to give way to sentimentality than to cultivate clear

thinking. But we cannot afford to forget that the real question is, What is best for the community?

The best thing that a man acquires from a liberal education is modesty that Socratic wisdom which is the truest wisdom. At the commencement season we hear comment on the college graduate which indicates that modesty is not regarded as his distinguishing characteristic. But I venture to say that it is really his one greatest asset. Of course we all forget pretty much every specific thing that we learned in college. What then is it that we bring away which is worth so much? Is it the recognition of the boundless fields of learning that we shall never traverse, of our own littleness beside the rest of the world, of how much better men are all around us. It is the "self-made" man who most lacks that knowledge. The man who knows one or two things and thinks that what he does not know it not knowledge is the really conceited man. And the higher you rise in the scale of education the more likely you are to escape that type of intellectual conceit.

All of this has a special application to a subject that is much in our minds at the present time, namely, the question of procedure. As is well known, our law begins with procedure. Sir Henry Mayne's striking observation about the secretion of substantive law in the interstices of procedure, which Lord Haldane quoted yesterday, states the fact picturesquely. It has been finely said that formalism is the twin-born sister of liberty; but the saying tells of an early stage in legal development. Technicality and unreasoned conservatism are, in truth, the special trait of the primitive creature, both in the growth of the individual and of the community. Any parent knows the rigid conservatism of the very young, their insistence that everything be done in the same way that it was done before. The analogy holds good with our profession. It is the lawyer with the slightest education and the least perspective to whom mere forms and arid technicality seem sacred because he was brought up to them. Illustrations of this will occur to any lawyer of experience; but I cannot help mentioning one or two.

At these sessions voices are sometimes raised in favor of a "free Bar"; and supposed statistics are cited to show that in those happy regions where the practice of law is a natural right of man, educated or uneducated, the quality of the Bar is as high as elsewhere. Now it may be an accident, but it also may not, that it is such an atmosphere which evoked from a court of last resort the luminous decision that when the issue was the age of a human being the inspection of that human being by the jury could not as matter of law be any evidence of his age, and therefore, no matter how ancient his appearance, the verdict that he was over 21 must be set aside unless supported by some other kind of testimony. The ground of this decision was, forsooth, that there was no way in which his appearance could be made a part of the record on appeal; as if the sole function of the judge and jury were to prepare a record for an appellate court!

That decision was the product of a "free Bar "; but the mental attitude of which it tells is unhappily to be found elsewhere. Not long ago I went before a legislative committee in my own state to support a bill simplifying procedure. The reforms sought were very mild, for procedure in Massachusetts is simple and rational, and the changes needed were relatively slight. But as we explained the sections, one after another, it became evident that to some members of the committee we seemed to be dangerous and revolutionary persons who were attacking the very keystone of the arch. When we came to the fifth section of the bill this is what happened. The section dealt with appeals in equity. Our practice provides for a commissioner, whose stenographic report contains every word spoken in the proceedings, including exceptions to evidence. But our court had found itself constrained by the language of the statute to decide that exceptions to evidence were not before the court on appeal, although the report reciting the exceptions was a part of the record. Accordingly to carry up these exceptions a bill of exceptions was also necessary. Such a bill of exceptions was a mere form, reciting the same matter already contained in the report, and the only change proposed by our fifth section was the aboli

tion of this formality, permitting exceptions to evidence to be taken up, like all other questions of law and fact, by the commissioner's report. In my simplicity I supposed that this section would not be criticized, and I presented it as rather a matter of course. But a lawyer on the committee—a gentleman of some prominence, whose respectability and zeal exceeded his legal education-took a different view of the matter, and questioned me long and gravely. As he questioned his indignation at such radical departures waxed warm, and he presently denounced the provision thus: "That, sir, seems to me a dangerous section. I call it a wicked section." The mental attitude which discovers wickedness in such a change is a sort of conservatism which does our profession great harm, and it is a sort of conservatism not likely to be found in an educated lawyer. It is the same sort of conservatism that you find in a deputy sheriff when you are obliged to argue a law point with him, and find yourself wishing that he had not possessed himself of that modicum of legal knowledge which has been decribed as “just enough law to pervert the understanding."

Mr. Taft referred last night in impressive language to the fact that the courts drawn from the best educated Bars have been the most liberal in matters of procedure, and the least hampered by mere technicality. It is natural that this should be so; and it is a weighty argument in favor of maintaining a high standard of education for admission to the Bar.

Another aspect of the matter, to which I will refer but briefly, was forced on my mind yesterday as I listened to the admirable address of the Chairman of the Section of Legal Education, namely, the relation of education to the question of moral character. Any one can see the importance of moral character in an applicant for admission to the Bar. But the difficulty of discovering the applicant's moral character is no less obvious. Mr. Smith drew a charming picture of the old-fashioned law office— a picture which to many young men of the present day must seem quite unreal and remote. The passing of that old-fashioned law office, the loss of old professional standards, the blurring of

the fact of professional standards, are things that all of us must deeply regret. Like many other beautiful and noble possessions of an earlier generation, these pass with the coming of a new order. In the old-fashioned office a young man naturally acquired the right professional attitude, that Sittlichkeit of which Lord Haldane spoke in another of its aspects. How is a young lawyer in a great city today to find a substitute for this school in which his father gained his professional standards? No law school would be justified in saying that it could take the place of the old law office. But I do think that some of the flavor, much that he can now get nowhere else, can be found in the right kind of law school, and that the law schools have a duty and opportunity of real service to the Bar in stimulating the young lawyer's moral tone as well as in training his mind.

Passing from these matters to some specific problems concerning Bar examinations, one finds himself in danger of lapsing quickly and deeply into truisms. We are all in favor of high standards. We acclaim them loudly and we are all in accord. "High standards" is a comfortable phrase, but it does not advance us far, and it is even possible that there is sometimes a slight flavor of cant in our use of it. The words “high standards" do not tell much. What do they really mean with reference to this subject? Certainly high standards are not disclosed by the mere fact that many candidates are rejected. The author of a detective story has an advantage over his reader in guessing its conclusion, and nothing could be easier than to construct an examination which nobody could pass. The poorest lawyer could do that. The rejection of candidates is no measure at all of high standards until we look into the rejected candidates on a qualitative and not a quantitative basis.

What sort of examination should we have? It cannot be a proper one unless it tests the candidate's grasp of fundamental principles and the lawyer-like quality of his reasoning. But these are not going to be disclosed by calling on him for memorized formulæ or for abstractions of any sort untested by concrete applications. The genius of the common law has always