The Columbia Law School of To-day. working rules which, any clever craftsman can learn to handle, but as a venerable body of scientific doctrine, repelling only the lightminded and profane, but yielding its treas ures to all earnest seekers. He believes that this learning, like all high doctrine, is a dis cipline as well as a code, an art as well as a science, and that he only can become its master who gives himself up to it to be shaped and conformed by it into its own likeness. He is convinced that this learning cometh not, like the kingdom of heaven, with out observation, but only as the reward of profound and diligent and unwearying appli cation. He believes, too, that a science which has one root running back through the cen turies to the springs of our history, and the other taking hold on all the ramified ex perience of our social life, can be understood and known — root and branch — as a master must know it, only by him who .knows it both historically and practically, who has traced it in its past growth and also studied it in its practical application to the concerns of to-day. He is fully persuaded that such a body of doctrine, so nobly conceived, can not be adequately dealt with in one year, nor in two, even by the most devoted student, nor in a dozen years by the student who comes to his task with a divided allegiance. Accordingly he claims the whole period of the student's apprenticeship and exacts dur ing the whole of that time the whole of the student's energy and devotion. He is not disposed to question the great benefits which the busy law clerk may derive from properly directed study under trained and accom plished teachers, but he sees that such a course has no reference to his ideal and knows that it is not for him. And as freely as he has received, so freely does he give. He yields ungrudging assent to the proposition that such devotion as he exacts from the student, requires an equal devotion and an equally exclusive service from the teacher. Indeed he cannot bring himself to believe that the conditions of such a service as his
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can be adequately met by the ministrations of the busy lawyer, whose best energies are necessarily given to the practice of an exacting profession. On the contrary, he magnifies his office, knowing it to be a com plete sphere of activity, calling for the exer cise of his highest faculties, demanding, for success, the same exclusive devotion that every high vocation exacts of its votaries. It would be strange indeed if this ideal of law and of service, this cooperation of stu dent and teaching body to the noble ends of learning had failed to bring forth fruits of the spirit such as have been described above. The outward changes which have marked this renascence of the law school have been many and important. Perhaps the most significant has been the extension and development of the curriculum. A decade ago the course of study was comprehended in a daily lecture (counting as seven and one-half hours per week) extending over two years; to-day the student in his first year has fourteen hours per week, in his second year has twenty-three hours offered him, (fourteen of which are required), and in his third year, twenty-five hours (of which four teen are required). The work required for the degree is, therefore, nearly three times as great to-day as it was when the record of the school was last spread before the readers of this magazine, while the amount of work offered to-day is more than four times as great as it was then. Along with this ex pansion and enrichment of the curriculum has gone on a corresponding coordination of subjects. To-day the course is, in a sense, graded, presenting a steady development from the beginning to the end. This de velopment is from simple to complex, from less to more difficult, partly, also, from the theoretical to the practical. The topics are so arranged as to throw light one upon another, or so as to serve as introductions to one another; certain subjects of great scope and importance — like real property
