Makoh 5, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



367 



lege now puts no particular pressure upon 

 the future law student to find himself. 

 The lawyer nowadays is two things. He 

 is obviously a practitioner. For this line 

 of activity he can doubtless be admirably 

 prepared by a sharp and severe technical 

 drill in the law school. So far, he is only 

 the clerk of his clients. But he is in real- 

 ity much more than this. He is the main 

 agent in adapting the great institutional 

 arrangements of society to its progressive 

 movement. As judge and legislator, it is 

 the lawyer who interprets, embodies and 

 guides deep social and ethical currents. 

 True enough, few lawyers as yet appreci- 

 ate and deliberately prepare themselves to 

 exercise this function; hence their resist- 

 ant, anti-social, obstructive bias. But the 

 college that seeks to train a race of intelli- 

 gent broad-gauge men will embrace the 

 opportunity to produce through a pro- 

 found study of ethical and industrial 

 forces and developments a race of lawyers 

 whose later technical acquisitions and 

 point of view will be conditioned by a 

 large consciousness of their constructive 

 social responsibility. The lawyer is in 

 large measure obstetrician to the future: 

 whether the birth will be painful or gentle 

 depends in no small degree on the skill, 

 intelligence and large-mindedness with 

 which our lawyers frame, apply and judge 

 our laws. "We live in a legal and institu- 

 tional framework that was built to pro- 

 tect us against dangers, many of which no 

 longer exist. Meanwhile totally different 

 emergencies have arisen. The question to 

 be solved through and, to a considerable 

 extent, by our lawyers, is whether these 

 institutions can be adapted to new condi- 

 tions without interruption of historic con- 

 tinuity. To appreciate their problem, to 

 get in possession of the data bearing on 

 it, the lawyer of the future must rest his 

 specific legal training on an adequate 

 grasp of the tendencies, perplexities and 



rational ideals that are seeking to utter 

 themselves. Once more, such training 

 must be had in the college, if it is to be had 

 anywhere. I repeat, the high school 

 comes too early; the professional school is 

 too busy and too late. And the training 

 in question must be worked out for the 

 boy, not hy him. That such preliminary 

 training would be in the truest sense lib- 

 eral as opposed to the immediately tech- 

 nical, vocational or professional, can, I 

 think, not be seriously disputed. 



An analogous course of reasoning ap- 

 plies to business. It is perfectly possible 

 even now to organize a course of study cal- 

 culated to prepare a youth to engage ef- 

 ficiently in commerce and to take broad 

 and intelligent views of the part that at 

 this moment commerce plays in promoting 

 national development and in realizing 

 rational ideals. This, I conceive, would be 

 a liberal, cultural treatment of the trade- 

 motive. That such an attempt would not 

 now be premature, Harvard has proved by 

 organizing a school of business administra- 

 tion. Unfortunately, it is a graduate 

 school, thus illustrating once more the 

 tendency to empty the college of all definite 

 content and responsibility. A student in- 

 tending to embark in trade is compelled, 

 before he can enjoy the opportunities of 

 the graduate school of business administra- 

 tion, to spend four years in college, doing 

 nothing in particular, before he can at 

 twenty-three get tardy leave to spend two . 

 more years preparing to be an intelligent 

 business man. The analogy followed in 

 making the school a graduate school is that 

 of law and medicine: a mistaken analogy, 

 as it seems to me. The student who gets 

 his degree in law or medicine is a lawyer 

 or a doctor. The student who passes 

 through the graduate school of business 

 is not a business man. He has accom- 

 plished in reference to business exactly 

 what the preliminary training in biology 



