NEW YORK: STATE BOARD OF LAW EXAMINERS. 20/ he has spent in the study of the law before he has passed the Regents' examinations. Upon another point there can be no doubt. There should be only one set of questions presented for the entire State at a given term of court. The New York Statute requires the Board of Law Examiners to hold two examinations each year in each Judicial Department. As there are four departments, the three examiners are obliged to present one examination paper in New York and Brooklyn, and on another day a different paper in Rochester and Albany. An amendment that will permit the Board to hold the examination for both the First and Second Departments either in New York or Brooklyn is essential to uniformity of standard. A knowledge of the legal, political, and to-day one is inchned to add the financial, history of his country, as well as of its com- mon and statute law, should be required of every one who seeks admission to the bar. At an address delivered at the annual meeting of the Chicago bar on July i6, 1896, Mr. Charles H. Aldrich, after describing the distress that existed in the country at the close of the Revolution- ary War and the jealousy that then divided the States, called at- tention to the fact that at that time there came into existence and power a large and violent party who proclaimed that the prosperity of the country lay in issuing unlimited irredeemable paper money, and in proscribing the lawyers. Mr. Aldrich's statement receives apt illustration in the follow- ing extract from the *' Letters of an American Farmer," written in 1782: — " Lawyers . . . are plants that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hands of others, and, when once they have taken root, they will extinguish every vegetable that grows about them. The fortunes they daily acquire in every province from the misfortunes of their fellow citizens are surprising. The most ignorant, the most bungling member of that profession, will, if placed in the most obscure part of the country, promote litigiousness, and amass more wealth without labor than the most opulent farmer with all his toils. They have so dexterously inter- woven their doctrines and quirks with the laws of the land, or rather they are become so necessary an evil in our present Constitution, that it seems unavoidable and past all remedy. What a pity that our forefathers, who happily extinguished so many fatal customs, and expunged from their new government so many errors and abuses, both religious and civil, did not also prevent the introduction of a set of men so dangerous ! . . . 28
