Solicitors cannot expect to make the handsome incomes earned by promi nent barristers. Still, those in good practice often earn from £1000 to £2000 a year. Fixed salaries, paid to solicitors as managing clerks to big firms of solicitors, may reach £700 or even ,P800 a rear. Solicitors, too, are eligible for appointment as Town Clerks, Clerks of the Peace, Magistrates' Clerks, Vestry Clerks, and so on. In the Civil Services vacancies frequently occur in the Estate Duty Office of Inland Revenue. Candidates must be qualified solicitors, and between the age of twenty-one and The salary ranges from .e150 to £500.
was an undoubted advantage, as the study of various systems had not been carried to any popular extent. A boy of sixteen, who could write a thoroughly good system of shorthand at a decent speed, might almost be certain of an opening in many directions. In addition, once he had acquired the art of writing good shorthand, he could find a steady income in teaching it.
To-day this has all changed. Shorthand nowadays is practically as necessary as the ability to write simple English, and it is almost as easy to acquire a working knowledge of the system. Instead of paying expen sive fees to private tutors, who were the earlier pioneers of shorthand, almost every educational authority preparing young men or women for a business career makes shorthand one of the subjects in its syllabus. Throughout the country it is taught by the technical and secondary schools, and an acquisition of a knowledge of a shorthand system is neither difficult. nor expensive.
Authorities agree that the best system in use at the present moment is the one invented by the late Sir Isaac Pitman. It is practically the standard system and represents the best logical method of abbreviating a language. The phonetic system, in its early days, much criticised, is now universally accepted as the system of shorthand which is taught by public institutions and practised by nearly every shorthand writer and any one who finds a need for shorthand in his business. It is the system generally in use by reporters for the press and official note-takers for public institu tions, courts, while throughout business the shorthand writer who uses any other system but Pitman's is an exception. There are, of course, other systems, and for some of them much might be said, but this is not the place to enter into a comparative estimate of their values. Pitman's shorthand succeeds because for all general purposes it is both logical and adequate, its teaching is standardised and it ha a literature of its own.
It is unlikely that any change will be made in the prevailing tendency to adopt Pitman's as the best system of shorthand to learn.
In learning shorthand under the Pitman system it is possible for the student to succeed without the aid of a teacher at all. The handbooks produced on behalf of this system are both exhaustive and practical, and a close study of the elementary and advanced sections of the publications will in itself produce efficiency. As, however, most young people are not naturally students, it has been found that the practical way of acquiring an adequate knowledge of shorthand is to go to a competent teacher, and, owing to the action of public authorities, competent teachers are very easy to obtain. Under such a teacher the work of learning shorthand is systematised, the student is set allotted tasks, he is corrected at every stage in his education, and proceeds progressively from the simple elements of the alphabet to the stage where he may be taken to be an adequate short hand writer. While a determined student might succeed easily studying alone,- for the majority of people it found simpler in practice to have their efforts directed by a competent teacher, and this method is probably more economical in the end.
Side by side with shorthand goes an acquisition of a knowledge of various typewriters, the latter being a logical development of the former. In office work to-day a knowledge of shorthand alone is scarcely valuable: it is necessary to be able to transpose one's notes on the typewriter ; for shorthand is ge4erally used in taking a dictation of correspondence and other memoranda. It is now almost useless to try to obtain a reasonably paid appointment in an office without a knowledge of shorthand and type writing, and no studeht of one, contemplating a commercial career, would neglect the other.
Like shorthand, the typewriter is nowadays easy to learn. The great commercial colleges teach it as a separate course, as do most of the com mercial colleges throughout the country, of which there are many,—tech nical institutes, polytechnics and similar institutions. The use of the typewriting machine is largely a matter of familiarity, although a great deal of help can be given by au expert directing the efforts of the student. What is chiefly is a machine to use and to practise on and the necessary desire to master its technicalities.