iples of law
of interest to the business man are developed from an examination of
actual cases of business litigation. We may very likely look forward
to the publication of case books which can be used either alone or in
conjunction with textbooks on legal principles. Lectures on law to
commercial students should be reduced to a minimum, and then they
should confine themselves to very broad principles which need no
lengthy exposition or to fields in which the students may be expected
to have a general grasp but no very detailed knowledge. But such
subjects as contracts, agency, bankruptcy, sales, insurance,
negotiable instruments, and forms of business association should be
taught thoroughly to the student in the classroom through the case
method, in which each case is fully discussed by the class and from
which discussion legal principles are evolved. It is interesting to
note that the states which stand highest in the matter of Certified
Public Accountancy licenses are requiring very thorough preparation in
law. To meet such requirements a course in law covering at least three
semesters, three hours a week, with a case method is certainly
necessary.

The modern languages taught in schools of commerce should be by the
direct method, and always with the vocational end clearly before the
student. Actual business transactions, such as selling to a foreign
customer in the foreign language, correspondence, newspapers,
catalogues and other documents of business, should be the
supplementary reading and exercise material of the class. Facility in
conversation and writing should be developed as rapidly as possible,
and the grasp of the methodical rules should follow. It would probably
be presumptuous to take a strong position here on the question of
teaching modern languages, but experience with commercial students has
clearly indicated that greatest progress can be made if the language
is taught by a conversation or direct method from the very start, and
if paradigms and rules of syntax are evolved after some vocabulary has
been developed and some facility in speech has been acquired. We may
say here, incidentally, that it seems wise to teach the spoken
language for a while before taking up the problem of the written
language, especially where the foreign language assigns different
phonetic values to the printed symbols from those assigned in English.

While the various technical subjects offer different problems because
of