another year to limit degrees to those who have attended two years, unless, indeed, as seems likely, the number of applicants for senior standing on office reading shall become so small that a strict rule may not necessary.
As the school year is longer in this institution than in perhaps any other, it will not be necessary to consider a longer course for the present.
The question as to what preparation shall be required for admission to the Law School involves the same difficulties as that with regard to length of course. It is highly desirable to have men with a good education; if they have had the discipline of a full college course, so much the better. But the school should not make requirements which cannot be met by those upon whom it is dependent for support. Indeed the question is not merely one of support, but, aside from that, it is whether the school would be doing the most possible toward forwarding the object of its creation, if it should limit its advantages to a few, by requiring conditions which the body of those desiring to study law cannot comply with. A strict entrance examination will keep away men who would make good lawyers, indeed who will make good lawyers by other modes of preparation.
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GEORGE G. WRIGHT
The suggestion is sometimes made that eventually a college course should be made a necessary qualification for admission to a professional school. Of course it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the learned professions demand the best preparation to be had, and that the neglect of the advantages of a college education, where it is attainable, is an indication of indifference not be promising well for future success. But to say to a young man to whom a college education is an impossibility, that he cannot therefore be a successful lawyer, is to fly in the face of experience. A considerable amount of mental training is essential to the effective study of law, but this may be acquired otherwise than in college. What is needed is not so much learning as discipline, and this may have resulted from other forms of mental activity. But with the increased facilities for a college education it is becoming true that the best equipped men are usually college graduates, and, without any requirement on the part of the schools, it will doubtless soon be a fact, in the West, as it already is in the East, that the great body of those who apply to them for admission will come with a college degree.
It is not to be understood that the advantages of the Law Department are limited to men. The University of Iowa from the first has admitted to all its Departments women on equal footing with men, obeying in this the growing sentiment for equality which has abolished distinctions between the sexes as to property rights, and has admitted women to practise at the bar. No objection whatever has appeared to the admission of women to the Department; they have made excellent students. But there seem to be
