e of law. For generations men "eat
their dinners" at the Inns of Court and learned no more. The law
itself they learned through practice, at the expense of their clients.
Anatomy was the obvious thing about medicine when Vesalius, of the
strong head and weak heart, cleaned away the superstitions of part of
the medical art and discovered a new world at twenty-eight. The
medical training of even seventy years ago, twenty years after
cellular pathology had dawned, held wearisome hours of dissection now
known to be a waste. It is the functions of the body and its organs
which we now know to be the more important, and not the bones,
muscles, nerves, and organs considered as mere mechanism.

The classroom is the patent thing about instruction. The normal
schools lavished time on the tricks of teaching until flocks of
instructors in the high schools and colleges could not inaccurately be
divided into those who could teach and knew nothing and those who knew
something and could not teach. Our colleges early thought they could
weave in Hebrew and theology, and send out clergymen, and later tried
to give the doctor a foundation on which eighteen subsequent months
could graft all he needed of medicine.

Reporting is the obvious aspect of journalism which the ignorant
layman sees. Many hold the erroneous view that the end of a school of
journalism is to train reporters. Reporting is not journalism. It is
the open door to the newspaper office, partly because there are very
few reporters of many years' service. Some of them are, but able men
before long usually work out of a city-room, or gain charge of some
field of city news, doing thus what is in fact reporting, but combined
with editorial, critical, and correspondent work. Such is the Wall
Street man, the local politics man, the City Hall man, or the Police
Headquarters man, who gathers facts and counts acquaintance as one of
his professional assets. But these men are doing, in their work, far
more than reporting as it presents itself to those who see in the task
only an assignment. Such men know the actual working of the financial
mechanism, not as economists see it, but as Bagehot knew it. They
understand the actual working of municipal machinery besides having a
minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in
administration. In our real politics, big and little, they and the
Washington and Albany correspondents are the only men who know both
sides, are tr