Doctor Johnson was succeeded by Doctor Myles Cooper, a Fellow of Oxford, who used to wear his mortarboard cap and scholar’s gown up Broadway.  In young Jay’s veins there was not a drop of British blood.  Of his eight great-grandparents, five were French and three Dutch, a fact he once intimated in the Oxonian’s presence.  And then it was explained to the youth that if such were the truth it would be as well to conceal it.

Alexander Hamilton got along very well with Doctor Cooper, but John Jay found himself rusticated shortly before graduation.  Some years after this Doctor Cooper hastily climbed the back fence, leaving a sample of his gown on a picket, while Alexander Hamilton held the Whig mob at bay at the front door.

Cooper sailed very soon for England, anathematizing “the blarsted country” in classic Latin as the ship passed out of the Narrows.

“England is a good place for him,” said the laconic John Jay.

So John Jay was to be a lawyer.  And the only way to be a lawyer in those days was to work in a lawyer’s office.  A goodly source of income to all established lawyers was the sums they derived for taking embryo Blackstones into their keeping.  The greater a man’s reputation as a lawyer, the higher he placed his fee for taking a boy in.

In those days there were no printed blanks, and a simple lease was often a day’s work to write out; so it was not difficult to keep the boys busy.  Besides that, they took care of the great man’s horse, blacked his boots, swept the office, and ran errands.  During the third year of apprenticeship, if all went well, the young man was duly admitted to the Bar.  A stiff examination kept out the rank outsiders, but the nomination by a reputable attorney was equivalent to admittance, for all members knew that if you opposed an attorney today, tomorrow he might oppose you.

To such an extent was this system of taking students carried that, in Seventeen Hundred Sixty-eight, we find New York lawyers alarmed “by the awful influx of young Barristers upon this Province.”  So steps were taken to make all attorneys agree not to have more than two apprentices in their office at one time.  About the same time the Boston newspaper, called the “Centinel,” shows there was a similar state of overproduction in Boston.  Only the trouble there was principally with the doctors, for doctors were then turned loose in the same way, carrying a diploma from the old physician with whom they had matriculated and duly graduated.

Law schools and medical colleges, be it known, are comparatively modern institutions—­not quite so new, however, as business colleges, but pretty nearly so.  And now in Chicago there is a “Barbers’ University,” which issues diplomas to men who can manipulate a razor and shears, whereas, until yesterday, boys learned to be barbers by working in a barber’s shop.  The good old way was to pass a profession along from man to man.