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its imminence that operates upon the average or lower type mind more effectively than feebly represented ideas of distant and problematic punishment even of the severest kind. The certainty of death itself, which hangs over good and bad alike, has little influence upon conduct until it is represented as certain and immediate.

In a widely advertised recent trial in Chicago it was interposed in behalf of two young men that while they know the difference between right and wrong and were therefore legalistically responsible, and under the law as it stood, might properly suffer the full consequences of their lack of adjustment to their social environment, yet it was not consistent with the current legal philosophy of punishment that they should incur the extreme penalty for acts which, on the whole, were not, owing to the effect of their training and environment, entirely voluntary. The vice of this reasoning is at once apparent. The pleader adopted in behalf of these boys the legalistic view of responsibility and asked that it be not applied in the particular case because it was scientifically unsound. It might have been replied that it was certainly no more unsound in that case than in every other. The answer to the contention that these young men acted along the lines of least resistance and greatest traction could have been that, scientifically speaking, society would also act along the line of least resistance and greatest traction by allowing them to undergo the consequences of maladjustment to their existing social environment.

That in a higher state of evolution the environmental circumstances contributed by man, in the form of laws and social customs, may be altered, and the punitive idea eliminated and the preventive idea predominate, may be anticipated. When that time arrives we will classify criminals rather than crimes. Some scientific method will have been evolved whereby just the right kind and degree of prevention for any particular individual of anti-social character will have been worked out. The law may then have been freed from the theological and metaphysical vestiges of its growth, which like human appendices have served their purpose and have now become only a source of danger, and the criminal laws can be administered with greater effectiveness and less rigor. The bandage can then be re

moved from the eyes of the goddess. She can recede into the twilight to join others who have gone before, and the administration of the law can be conducted as a business of society, along increasingly scientific lines and at less cost to the individual and to society.

Nature's method of protecting the individual from internal dangers affords a beautiful illustration of the protective or preventive principle. When the blood stream is invaded by hostile germs the police are multiplied and the dangerous individual invaders are destroyed by the phagocytes, or, in other cases, the hostile germs are encapsulated, i. e., they are put into jail and kept there. There is no commutation of sentence for enforced good conduct. The prisoners are going to act according to their nature if given the chance. They are not given the chance. Scientific humanitarianism will concern itself with the source of supply of the criminal element, by controlling to some extent dangerous heredity and by improving environmental conditions.

The illustration taken from the criminal law was but one of many that offer themselves. It is anticipated that the majority of those who may chance to read this article, particularly among the members of the legal profession, will deny the premises and dissent from the conclusions. In as much, however, as it was offered purely in a suggestive and by no means in a controversial spirit, it will have served its purpose if it shall have caused a reexamination of old formulas in the light of generalizations drawn from other fields of modern thought. Even so the illustration was of a subordinate and not of the principal theme. We started out with the suggestion that there is at present no true science of the law, but that such a science was both possible and desirable. Our inquiry was not so much as to whether we have reached any really admirable stage in the evolution of law, as to whether the broad natural laws could be discovered which have determined the progress thus far made.

For instance, should the result of exhaustive and competent investigation reveal that the trend of evolution has been from that stage wherein society simply undertook to enforce the commands supposed to be imposed by supernatural but anthropomorphic deities ruling the universe,

toward a stage where divine justice is relegated to the world to come and man's laws are to be designed solely from the viewpoint of the preservation of the species and its progressive evolution, we may be said to have discovered at least one general natural law. We mean, of course, by natural law what scientists generally mean by the term, that is, an order of phenomena observed to be universally followed. That there is such a law is not here asserted. It can be asserted, however, with some degree of positiveness that the law making activities of man are not the result of lawless chance, nor would anyone familiar either with our case or statute law care to assume the position of accusing the All Wise of being their sole author. It would seem that the three hypotheses examined exhaust the possibilities as to their origin.

Unconvincing as our attempt at special illustration may seem to many, and however inadequate our effort to establish the possibility of erecting law into a true science, it can, however, be quite positively asserted that society will not be the loser in the end if legal phenomena are classed with all others as a legitimate subject of investigation according to methods now firmly established in other fields of human interest.

One advantage that may reasonably be apprehended to come out of a more scientific method of reasoning concerning legalistic and political formulas may be some clearer notion as to the aim and object of laws and customs, if they are to become instruments of progressive evolution rather than brakes upon the wheels of human progress. There is for instance the absurd but widespread "equality principle," which is the ultimate premise of so much of the socialistic and communistic thought of the day. It is, of course, equality of reward to which we refer. The American political principle of equality of opportunity is sound and fundamental. It is a corollary of human liberty. No active interposition of the State is needed to secure it. It is also a postulate of social justice, that is to say, non-interference by society, except where its collective interest demands it, with the fullest liberty of the individual or group of individuals. Equality of reward, on the other hand, can be secured only by the active intervention of the State in the effort to prosper one individual or class of individuals at the expense

of their natural superiors. Perhaps some competent philosopher will trace the genesis of this generally accepted but curious notion that equality of reward is either equitable, in the broad sense, just, or desirable.

Should the end of law making, it may be asked, be the greatest possible interference by organized society with individual activities in order to bring about as great equality as possible among individuals; or, should it not, quite the contrary, prevent as far as possible any interference by one individual, or group of individuals, with the opportunity of another to profit to the fullest extent by those natural inequalities between them which are at once the result of evolutionary progress, and the condition under which alone it is possible.

One hypothesis as to the origin of the equality principle is that it is the result of the belief that in spite of the perceived difference between individuals of the same species yet in the eyes of the ancient deities all men were so insignificant that the minor differences between them were negligible. It was the privilege of the gods to ignore in their treatment of them, and indeed to resent, the manifestation in them, of any claim of superiority on the part of one over the other. It is of course a matter of common observation that there is no equality of any kind between individual men, either as to their inherited or acquired characteristics and abilities, and it is an odd conception of justice that law should concern itself with depriving the superior individual of the full benefit of his superiority, rather than in the prevention of interference with the fullest liberty to secure all the advantages to which his abilities entitle him, provided always that these are compatible with the preservation of the species and its higher evolutionary progress.

It is not surprising that so many people, although the words are in their mouths daily, have no clear conception of liberty or of justice. Liberty certainly connotes the idea of freedom from undue and unjust restraint, while justice would be poorly served by defining it as a process whereby the freedom of the individual is to be interfered with to the utmost to the end that a destructive equality may be effectuated. Observation abundantly demonstrates that individuals may be leveled down, but they cannot be leveled

up. Whatever may be said of the preservation of the species, certainly its progressive upward evolution has never been promoted by the process of preserving the unfit and leveling the inequalities between them and those individuals in the inheritance of whose characteristics all hope of improvement must be sought.

The masses, who are so often heard to complain that law and justice do not invariably coincide, fail to take into consideration that many law makers have no very clear idea as to what justice consists in, and, on the other hand, groups of ignorant, selfish or bigoted persons, who are among those often heard loudest complaining, not infrequently take advantage of the complex and imperfect machinery of government to accomplish injustice under the guise of law. Having falsely registered as the opinion of society their own anti-social instincts, these have the temerity to invoke the divine wrath upon those impious enough to differ with them as to the respectability of their accomplishment.

It will doubtless require many generations before these ideas, which are now so warmly espoused by a few, will be so generally accepted in a democracy that human evolution will be accelerated. However, not even the marvelous contributions of modern science to the promotion of the material welfare of humanity can be ranked with the importance of the task which it has been the purpose of this brief article to point out to those more competent to undertake it.

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