1.—13 a.

49

PHOFEBBOH LABY.

20. How on earth is it, then, that Auckland and Canterbury and Otago can get through on £153, £69, and £56 each?—ln the case of Otago until recently the students did not use the library. It was not accessible to them. 21. For Victoria College £307 is put down, while two of the others do not spend anything like half of that? —That is simply because they never attempted to provide a library. That is one of the effects of our system of external examination. A library is not necessary in cramming for external examinations. You use cram text-books instead of a library. 22. Then until the question of internal or external examination is settled the libraries can go on just as they are, and tin' v ey will be sufficient? — Not at all, because if you provide a library as we have done at Victoria College and make it accessible to the students you will find that it is used. Our difficulty at present is to find enough room for the students who wish to use the library.

Professor Adamson, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Victoria College, made a statement. (No. 13.) Witness: I wish to criticize the Inspector-General's report on the following grounds: The report makes no provision for specialization in any subject or group of subjects at A ictoria College. Without assigning any reasons the report proposes to withdraw the annual grant of £2,000 hitherto assigned to Victoria College for the purpose of specializing in science and law. On the other hand he recommends, in addition to the amount of £11,000 to be spent yearly by each college on its staff, the expenditure at Otago University of an additional annual sum of £8,000 for staffing in home science, mining, medicine, and dentistry, and at Canterbury College of £3,000 in engineering. Home science is given a special grant for the first time. That is the first objection. The second objection I have is to the staff which the Inspector-General proposes for law. You will find his suggested type on page 10. I assume it is his ideal type. He calls it his "suggested type." It consists of one professor, two lecturers, and one assistant. Such a staff is entirely inadequate if anything like a properly equipped law school is ever to be established in New Zealand. For the purpose of comparison the stalling at a few other universities may be given. I quite admit that they are not on all-fours with the New Zealand University, but I think we ought to have them. I take, for example, Oxford. There are four professors, four readers, and fourteen lecturers, two being university and twelve inter-collegiate. At Cambridge there are three professors and one reader and ten lecturers. At Edinburgh there are six professors, five of whom have assistants, and there are seven lecturers. At Glasgow there are three professors, two of whom have assistants, and six lecturers. At Harvard there are ten professors and five lecturers. At Yale there are nine professors and five lecturers. At the Stanford University in California there are five professors, one assistant professor, and one lecturer. The Inspector-General's report has to be corrected in one respect. On page 2 he states the staff at the Sydney University t<. consist of one professor and four lecturers. There are also three readers. ' The next point is that the number of law students at each university mentioned is not given. The number of students at Edinburgh is 298, Glasgow 174, Harvard about 800, Yale 286, and Stanford 127. I have taken the figures for Edinburgh from the calendar, and I have reason to believe that the number has dropped since then. It was the latest calendar I had. When I was in Scotland last winter I was informed by the Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh that the law students had dropped by about 2r> per cent. Taking the universities mentioned by the Inspector-General, at Leeds the law students are included in the arts; at Manchester the number I got from the Professor of Law there is fifty-three students. Besides these however, it is right to mention that he tells me there are two hundred students attending courses at what he calls the Bankers' Institute. Then at Adelaide the number I got from the professor was, say. fifty students; at Sydney the number was eighty-five; and at Melbourne twenty to thirty LL.B. course, thirty to forty articled clerks' course. So long as it is attempted to provide'legal education at four separate colleges so long will it be impossible to have a thoroughly efficient law school in the Dominion. This end can only be attained by concentrating all effort* on one centre. The proposal to establish four law schools, if carried out would perpetuate a vicious system which has been practically condemned. T wish to put on 'record an excerpi from an address given by the Right Hon. .Mr. Bryce in an address at the Victoria College graduation ceremony in 1912. He said, "In New Zealand they would be obliged to try to specialize in each of the four colleges. The difficulty of concentration oi teaching-power, efforts and finance upon one fully equipped and complete University was found in a country whero'there were four centres of population each having independent and separate claims. 1! that could not be done surely the next lies! course would be to allot to each college some special field of activity in which it' could attain the highest standard of excellence, so that instead ot four colleges imperfectly equipped they could have four colleges equipped to the highest point oi efficiency in one department. It was not essential that a man should continue at the same University for the whole of his career. . . . They might have, as they now had at Otago, a highly equipped medical faculty; at Auckland a faculty of mechanics and allied sciences; at Canterbury agriculture; and at Wellington law, economics, and finance. These were only illustrations "' 'I he money required for the payment of lecturers and for the foundation and upkeep of' libraries at the other colleges should be devoted to scholarships, which would enable local students to attend the one law school, just as other students have to attend the one school for medicine, engineering, or mining. I might add that law students may keep their first and second years' terms at any of the four centres. 1 should like also to mention this: the library at Victoria College contains 1,258 law books and periodicals. At the other three colleges there are 111 altogether. The Univerßity at Yale has 32,000 law volumes.

7—l. 13a.