1 84 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. And (5), in saying that proper University teaching of law means all this, I am saying in the same breath that it means another thing ; viz., the endowment of such schools. The highest education always means endowment ; the schools which give it are all charity schools. What student at Oxford or Cambridge, at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Ann Arbor, or Chicago pays his way? We must recognize, in providing for teaching our great science of the law, that it is no exception to the rule. Our law schools must be en- dowed as our colleges are endowed. If they are not, then the managers must needs consult the market, and consider what will pay ; they will bid for numbers of students instead of excellence of work. They will act in the spirit of a distinguished, but ill- advised trustee of one of the seats of learning in my own State of Massachusetts, when he remarked, " We should run this institution as we would run a mill ; if any part of it does not pay, we should lop it off." They will come to forget that it is the peculiar calling of a University to maintain schools that do not pay, or, to speak more exactly, to maintain them whether they pay or not ; that the first requisite for the conduct of a University is faith in the highest standards of work ; and that if maintaining these standards does not pay, this circumstance is nothing to the purpose, — maintained they must be, none the less. It has been justly said that it is not the office of a University to make money, or even to support itself, but wisely to use money. If, then, we of the American Bar would have our law hold its fit place among the great objects of human study and contempla- tion ; if we would breed lawyers well grounded in what is funda- mental in its learning and its principles, competent to handle it with the courage that springs from assured knowledge, and inspired with love of it, — men who are not, indeed, in any degree insensi- ble to worldly ambitions and emoluments, who are, rather, filled with a wholesome and eager desire for them, but whose minds have been lifted and steadied and their ambitions purged and animated by a knowledge of the great past of their profession, of the secular processes and struggles by which it has been, is now, and ever will be struggling towards justice and emerging into a better conform- ity to the actual wants of mankind, — then we must deal with it at our Universities and our higher schools as all other sciences and all other great and difficult subjects are dealt with, as thoroughly, and with no less an expenditure of time and money and effort. James Bradley Thayer,
