licist was elected professor of history and political economy in 1835. While it does not seem that he ever found the political atmosphere of South Carolina wholly congenial, especially in view of his wellknown opposition to the "peculiar institution" of slavery, he nevertheless continued to labor with great enthusiasm and efficiency in the class rooms of South Carolina College until 1856, when he resigned, shortly afterwards to become a professor in Columbia College, New York. During this period his activities are evidenced not merely by the great interest that was awakened by him among the students of the college in political science and public law, but also by the publication of the three treatises which have immortalized his name among scholars: A Manual of Political Ethics (1838), Legal and Political Hermeneutics (1839), and Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853).*

Developments After the War of Secession.

As has been stated, the outbreak of the war caused the suspension of all the law schools in the South with the exception of that at the University of Virginia, which continued its sessions with insignificant attendance. With the return of peace, or within a few years thereafter, all of these schools, excepting those at Transylvania University and William and Mary College, resumed their sessions, but with changed character. The extreme prostration of all interests in the Southern states consequent upon the four years of disastrous conflict, was peculiarly felt in educational institutions of every grade and character. People who had little to spend for the barest necessaries of life, had nothing to invest in education.

The broad plans, the lofty ambitions, and

* See History of Higher Education in South Carolina, by Colyer Merlwether (U. S. Bureau of Education, 1889), pp. 143, 153, et passim.

liberal educational views that had been so marked before the war, and had so remarkably qualified the public men of the South for political leadership, disappeared before the gaunt spectres of poverty and despair. When the law schools reopened their doors, the institutions with which they were connected were without income from endowment funds or other sources. The young men whose tastes and ambitions led them into the law were without funds necessary to sustain the expense of even a brief course of study. Hence, most of them were forced to rely upon the slender instruction to be had in lawyers' offices, and there were few who applied for admission to the law schools. Furthermore, during the chaotic period of the war, the entire educational system of the Southern states was disorganized, and educational qualification for professional life was impossible. Hence the few young men who were in a position to seek instruction in the law schools during the first decade after the close of the war, were sadly lacking in any adequate preparation for their professional studies. It was inevitable that standards of admission, standards of scholarship, and even educational ideals, should fall to a low level. All of the Southern schools dispensed with any sort of requirements for admission, and all of them professed adequately to instruct young men in the difficult science of the law, and to equip them for the responsible duties of a counselor within the short space of one session. As a single illustration we may cite the case of the law school of Cumberland University, the ante-bellum career of which had been so honorable. In 1866 it was heroically reopened, but despite the devoted labors of able professors, it was unable to maintain its former standards, and in 1871 its course of study was

reduced to the brief period of one session of nine months, and above this low level it has never since been able to rise. The University of Virginia Law School, on account of the great fame of that institution, and the wide reputation of its gifted professor of law, John B. Minor, was more fortunate in attracting a larger number of students, who, during the first ten years after the war, averaged quite one hundred in number. But even such relative prosperity did not seem to justify the law school in requiring of its graduates in law a longer period of study than one session, until 1894. At Washington and Lee University the date of requiring more than one session's study for graduates in law was even later.

With returning prosperity new law schools were established.* During the last decade, especially, the increase of wealth in the South has resulted in a more adequate support for its principal institutions of learning, and there is to be noted, during this period, a decided awakening among these institutions to the necessity of elevating the standards, and increasing the efficiency of the law schools connected with them. In this forward movement the North Carolina institutions have borne an honorable part. The University of North Carolina department of

University of Alabama, 1873; Vanderbilt University, 1875; University of West Virginia, 1878; University of Texas, 1883; University of South Carolina, 1883; University of Tennessee, 1890; Richmond College, 1870; University of the South, 1892; Mercer University, 1875; University of Arkansas, 1889; Wake Forest College, 1895; Central University, Kentucky, 1894; Millsaps College, 1896; Stetson University, Florida, 1900; Trinity College, North Carolina, 1904; State University of Louisiana, 1906. The Jefferson School of Law was established in Louisville in 1905, and in the same year the old Transylvania Law School was reëstablished as a department of the Kentucky University. Divers other law schools of a more or less ephemeral character have been established at various times and places, but they have no historical significance, other than as indicating the disposition needlessly to increase the number of law schools, rather than to elevate the standards and efficiency of those already existing. It is worthy of note that in 1888 there was established at Raleigh, N. C., as a department of Shaw University, a law school exclusively for the instruction of colored men. This school seems to have been maintained continuously, but with a very small attendance. See Report of Commissioner of Education, 1906-07.

law has, since 1887, required two years of college work of its graduates in law. Trinity College instituted a law course of three years in 1904, and Wake Forest College in 1905. The University of Texas extended its course from two to three years in 1906, and with the session of 1908-09 has begun to require one year of college work as a requirement of admission to its law school. The University of Virginia, Tulane University, and Vanderbilt University will require a course of three years for graduation after the session of 1909-10. These changes clearly indicate the strongly progressive tendency among the best Southern law schools to advance their requirements both for admission and for graduation to the standard that has been set by the more fortunate institutions in the wealthier Northern states.

In conclusion, the reader will note that during the period extending from the establishment of the American Union to the outbreak of the War of Secession, legal education, as provided for the young men of the Southern states, was more extensive, more thorough, and more liberal than that offered in any other part of the United States; that this was due partly to the fact that in the Southern states the early leaders were lawyers of great ability and sound training; and that, in turn, the excellent educational facilities provided for training the young men of the South to a proper conception of the function of a lawyer and for public service, had not a little to do with continuing that political leadership in the councils of the nation, for which the Southern states were so remarkable during this period. The destructive effects of the war were felt most disastrously by Southern educational institutions, and the young men growing up in the South since the war who desired adequate and liberal

training in the science of government and law could secure it only in the great institutions in the Northern states. Thus the prostrate South, deprived of its one-time civilization, and financially bankrupt, was further shorn of the very source of its former power, the right training of the young men who were to be its leaders in public thought and public action. Hence, no one can be surprised that this powerful influence, operating with others, has caused its former political glory to depart from the South, and brought upon it a long period of eclipse, from which it is fortunately now emerging. The rapid improvements recently made in facilities for education in law and politics throughout the South justify the belief that the time will soon come when it will be within the power of every young man in the South who has the requisite ambition and perseverance necessary for leadership to secure as broad and effective training in law and politics as can be acquired by his heretofore more fortunate Northern brethren, and that there will gradually rise up from the bar leaders qualified once more to restore the South to a position of influence in the councils of the nation.

WILLIAM REYNOLDS VANCE, Dean of the Faculty of Law, George Washington University.