CHAPTER XI

THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

Using the figurative words, "the law," in their widest possible sense, to mean the entire system which governs the relations of the individuals in a community with each other and with the community at large, we can easily see that in a century's time many changes of law will have taken place. If it be true that legislative restraints are mostly necessitated by the ill-conceived energies of mankind, and that the right function of the law is to assure to each citizen the largest possible liberty that is consistent with the equal liberty of every other citizen and of all, then it will be right to believe that the great extension of general intelligence, and the equally great extension of general morality, anticipated for the next century, will render many forms of existing restraint obsolete because unnecessary. Regarding offences both against the person and against property as manifestations, for the most part, of unintelligence, we may expect that increased intelligence will lead to a diminution of their number. In applying statistics to an examination of the question whether and to what extent improvements in the general standard of education have in the past diminished crime, and consequently how far crime is likely to be still further diminished in the future, we must be careful to keep in sight two considerations--first, that an increased vigilance and elaboration on the part of authority may easily make it appear that crime has failed to diminish under educational influences, when it is only the detection and punishment of crime that have been rendered more perfect; and second, that if one kind of education have not had all the salutary effects expected of it, it does not follow that a different kind will not have all this expected efficacy and more. Manifestly, legislation against crimes formerly outside the reach of the law--that creation of "new offences" which one hears rather foolishly objected to--will increase statistics of crime, if we compute crime in terms of prison-admissions; and the fact that such increase, due entirely to legislation, has taken place concurrently with some other reform, such as the improvement of education, obviously does not entitle us to connect the increase with the reform. The latter may even be operating in exactly the opposite manner, despite the statistics. A number of new offences were created, for instance, by what is called in England the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and it would be easy for a shocked observer of prison statistics to observe, in a period of years during which the administration of that useful act was being perfected, dreadful increases in the crimes which it represses; whereas the fact probably is that crime of this sort has diminished, largely through the action of the very causes which would make it appear to have been increasing. Therefore, if anyone still argues that education as a means of diminishing crime has proved a failure, it is not upon judicial statistics that he must base his contentions. Probably that argument is obsolete: but if it were not, and if it were allowed all the validity of which it is capable, it would still furnish no ground whatever from which to throw doubt upon the expectation that in a hundred years' time crime will have diminished very greatly, as a result of the improved education of the new era. For indeed, as education is at present conducted, it would be rather a remarkable thing that it should have any effect upon criminality at all. What influence increased intelligence may have in restraining one part of the population from the desire to commit crime might easily be neutralised by the effect, on another portion, of the increased craft and subtlety imparted by education. Knowledge can facilitate crime as well as deter from it. A man who has not learned to write, it has been shrewdly remarked, will not commit forgery: but that is not a reason for thinking that a knowledge of writing tends to promote criminality. The man who, being (perhaps unduly) proficient in it, becomes a forger, would not necessarily have remained blameless if he had continued illiterate. He would very probably have been a thief, which does not require penmanship: but on the other hand, the increased facility of obtaining employment when one can write might just as easily have saved him from some temptations to dishonesty. It is not very rational to expect a great moral effect upon character from the mere acquisition of knowledge. But from the moment we conceive that means and methods of education in the future will be valued in proportion to their influence in developing character, and especially intelligent self-control, it is impossible to doubt that the new teaching will be among the most potent of moral influences. One benefit derived from this will be the possibility of abandoning legislative restrictions whose effect is inimical to self-control and to intelligent self-protection. It will no longer be necessary to protect the people by law from the consequences of their own foolishness, and we shall have learned that it is much better for the public to be encouraged to safeguard its own interests than to be relieved of the necessity to do so.

Anticipating, therefore, that many existing forms of restraint will have become obsolete because unnecessary, we may very fairly ask ourselves whether, in an improved moral and intellectual atmosphere, it will not have been found advisable to abolish other restraints and requisitions as a directly remedial measure. The suggestion may, at the moment, appear chimerical, but so must every intelligent anticipation of a coming time appear to anyone who approaches the subject without allowing for the difference of conditions, and conceives of changes which will take place so gradually as to be almost unperceived, as if they were to occur per saltum, without any process of slow moral preparation. So would nearly every social condition of the present age have appeared individually to a citizen of the world of 1800, if, possessing intelligence to foresee it, he lacked the imagination necessary to foresee the accompanying and subservient conditions. That public opinion should be so shocked by the execution of capital punishment, that only the most atrocious murders are thus punished--the sentence, where there is any real extenuation at all, being habitually commuted nowadays--is a condition which would hardly have suggested itself even to the most alert imaginations in an age where small thefts were constantly punished by death. Our sense of what may be called the accidental influences of punitive measures is even yet so little developed that only a small minority of the public at the present day is able to perceive that the deterrent effect of flogging, as a punishment for violent robbery, is dearly purchased at the expense of the brutalising relish with which sentences of flogging are welcomed by the public, and even on the judicial bench, where expressions of regret that the same penalty cannot be inflicted for other crimes are still common. Yet it would seem obvious enough that the sanction given to acts of violence by the deliberate adoption of hanging and flogging by the law, which is supposed to be the exemplar of public morality, must tend nearly as much to perpetuate crimes of violence as fear of these chastisements to deter. In attempting to foresee the spirit of legislation in the future it is absolutely necessary to foresee concurrently the spirit of the communities by which the legislation will be adopted. Anticipating, as we cannot fail to anticipate, a sedulous care for moral effects in education, we must anticipate an equal care in legislation. It would be unworthy of the supremely logical age which assuredly is coming, to use all possible measures in the schoolroom to foster in childhood self-reliance and intelligent self-protection, while continuing by "grandmotherly" government of the people to remove as often as possible any need for self-reliance in the adult. The advantages attending little bits of protective law-making often blind us to their ill-effects. It is no doubt very useful to provide, as we do provide, that condensed milk, when deprived of its full proportion of cream, shall only be sold in packages notifying that deprivation. If we did not do this children would be starved by their parents' ignorance. But the necessity for this enactment is at least in part created by the existence of a host of similar laws, the aggregate effect of which is to give a general impression that anything sold as food is good and useful unless it bears some warning to the contrary; and meantime every evasion of commercial morality which does not come under legislative restraint is naturally held to be perfectly justifiable--not at all a good thing for commercial morality. Now it would be a highly perilous measure to abolish, at a stroke, all protective legislation against adulterated or impoverished foods. We have built up a social condition in which every man thinks himself entitled to be protected against such frauds. But in a community which has been taught to take care of itself, and protect itself against frauds by its own intelligence, such protections would be retrograde and injurious. The aim of legislatures in the next century will be to foster all kinds of self-reliance. They will perceive that even the high importance of a reform which can be more or less easily enforced by law does not compensate for the bad effect of thus enforcing it, if it could be maintained by the spontaneous vigilance of a wisely-nurtured public; and the degrading effect of superfluous law will be more dreaded than the temporary dangers against which the law might protect the citizens.

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that, during a period more or less extended, material progress will be accompanied by numerous legal enactments such as a perfect state would dispense with, and possibly the end of all of them will not have been reached even in a century's time. How invention tends to promote legislation has recently been noticeable in the new laws affecting automobile traffic on roads. In a perfect state it would doubtless be unnecessary to provide legal machinery to compel the owners of powerful and rapid vehicles to respect the rights of their fellow-citizens and to abstain from running away without identifying themselves when they had caused an accident. In proportion as the moral condition of the next century approximates to perfection, such ordinances as the motor-car laws will be unnecessary. But for a long time new laws will always be coming into necessity as a result of new inventions. For instance, when, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, business is carried on largely through the medium of recording telephones, wirelessly actuated, special laws will have to be devised to protect trade against the various kinds of fraud which this method of transaction would otherwise facilitate, and some methods will have to be devised for giving legal force to arrangements made by telephony, akin to the methods which now give legal force to written contracts. Similarly, various by-laws will have to be enacted to protect the public against the accidents incidental to the various methods of rapid transit that will have come into use. Probably it will no longer be necessary, and it will have been perceived to be injurious, to protect travellers against their own rashness.

It is a well-known phenomenon that periods of material prosperity and high wages are fruitful in crime. Probably increased consumption of alcohol in prosperous times is the sole cause of this. There can be no direct connection between wealth and criminality; the bulk of the criminal population is, on the contrary, poor. It would be idle to speculate as to whether the next century will or will not continue to legislate against intoxicants, because it is morally certain that intoxicants will have been legislated out of existence already, without waiting for the period when it would no longer be necessary to abolish them forcibly. For at present, and in the more immediate future, there is no ground whatever for anticipating that the legislative hand will be withheld wherever law-making appears the simplest and most obvious method of getting rid of any crying evil: and there can be no doubt that the abuse of alcohol is an evil of precisely the sort that legislature will be active in suppressing. Some changes in the method of government will have to take place before Parliament can legislate against alcohol: but that it will so legislate before the middle of this century is morally certain. In what country the alcohol law is first likely to be passed is immaterial. Every country which adopts it will thereby assist in forcing the same measure upon other countries, because, with international travel constantly becoming cheaper and more easy, it is certain that numerous people who object to being deprived of stimulants and intoxicants in one country will migrate to others where their appetite can have full play, and will intensify the drink problem in those countries until these, too, are forced, or will think themselves forced, to legislate in self-protection. Thus such laws will become universal. No doubt this condition will be reached gradually, measures of restriction preceding measures of prohibition. But the end will be the same, and it will be forced upon the world as much by the increased evils inflicted by alcohol on nerves increasingly susceptible to its influence, as by any other consideration. Anyone who has taken the trouble to observe the nervous and physical condition of men and women in the average, during even so short a period as the last quarter of a century, must have been impressed by the marked increase of neurotic states, not merely in exceptional individuals, but in all the people. The neurotic temperament is much more adversely affected by alcohol than any other; and we are all growing more neurotic. All the conditions of modern life tend that way: and it is not alcohol alone that will have to go, but all sorts of habit-inducing drugs, such as morphine, cocaine, and the rest, all of which, like alcohol itself, will soon be so restricted in regard to their sale that their abuse will be rendered practically impossible, and their use restricted to a purely medical employment. It is even quite possible, and I have already ventured to predict, [30] that when the progress of neurotism has worked itself out, even such mild exhilarants as tea and coffee will have to be made the subjects of legal restriction. There exist many individuals at the present moment upon whom coffee acts as a stimulant nearly as powerful as alcohol, moderately employed, upon the rest of us--that is to say, they experience the same mild exhilaration after a cup of strong coffee as a moderate man does after a glass of burgundy or a whisky-and-soda. These effects are no more injurious, at present, than those of a moderate use of wine or spirits: but they can become perilous, and may develop in all sorts of ways, when the nervous organisation becomes more delicate. Thus, the abolition of alcoholic beverages, at present the fad of a minority not always very respectable in the methods of its propaganda, will presently be an indispensable feature of social progress.

Unless all criminologists are wrong in their deductions, something like fifty per cent. of all crime will be got rid of when alcohol no longer exists to cause crime. There are further ameliorative influences certain to be at work which will tend to reduce the sorts of crime chiefly troublesome at present. Adopting the familiar division of crime into (a) offences against the person and (b) offences against property, it is very easy to see that what may be called private crime (as distinguished from crime against the body politic) will diminish automatically. When the extremes of wealth and poverty have become as much less marked as I have endeavoured to show that they must become, it is evident that the temptation to offences of greed will be greatly diminished. A large proportion of all these crimes arises out of poverty alone, or out of poverty coupled with stupidity. A man who has not enough intelligence to earn is very likely to steal in order to provide for himself; and one who is equipped by the knowledge of a trade is consequently not so liable to be dishonest as one who is less hopefully situated. He is also likely to be more intelligent, and consequently better qualified to perceive that the balance of comfort is on the side of the honest worker and not on the side of the burglar or thief. Anyone who has had occasion to observe the proceedings of criminal courts must have noticed the frequency with which the description "labourer" is adopted by the offenders charged. "Labourer" means an unskilled worker--a man who has learned no trade, and brings nothing to his work but thews and sinews. It is much less common to find a trade claimed: one rarely sees a thief or burglar described on the charge sheet as "John Doe, carpenter," or "Richard Roe, gas-fitter." They do not even profess to have a trade. Of course where a man's business is such as to lend itself to criminal pursuits, the case is different: one finds banknote forgers described as "engravers" and "lithographers," and makers of counterfeit money as "die sinkers." But in the average of crime--at least crime of the more stupid sorts--it is the tradeless man who is nearly always charged. It is impossible to resist the inference that poverty is a determining cause in most crimes of greed. In a hundred years' time the spread of technical education will have thinned the ranks of the unskilled. At the same time the inducements to honesty and steady industry will have been enormously increased through the universality of the profit-sharing system; and the position of the steady worker will have become so greatly more attractive than that of the casual thief, that only the utmost stupidity can tempt anyone to the latter's course of life. Self-respecting labour for a share in the profits of labour, instead of mechanical toil for wages that do not bear any relation to profits nor to anything else except the fluctuations of the labour-market, will so elevate the average of industrial character that it will be rare for workmen to drift into crime. At the same time, and similarly, the restraint placed upon undue accumulation of wealth will diminish temptation to crimes of greed at the other extremity of social life. It will no longer be worth anyone's while to organise colossal schemes of dishonest company-promoting. Thus, crimes against property are certain to become relatively infrequent, because the greatest temptations to them will have been removed.

Apart from the largely preponderating number of cases in which offences against the person--assaults and the like--arise now out of intoxication, the tendency to crimes of violence will also diminish as the temper of society grows milder. An age so much advanced in sentimentality as to revolt against the cruelty of breeding horses for traction and cattle for food is not likely to be fruitful in offences of violence. These offences, where associated neither with drink nor robbery, probably arise more often from jealousy between the sexes than anything else. It is unfortunately impossible to suggest that sexual jealousy can be wholly eliminated from human nature. But no doubt its violent exhibition will have been educated out of us to a large measure. Other personal offences, as rape, criminal assault and various criminal vices will doubtless diminish in frequency as a consequence of general moral improvement. In short, the work of the policeman will be greatly eased in the course of this century, and no doubt many functions at present relegated to the police, such as the direction of street traffic, the care of vagrant dogs, and the like, will be performed by officials of a different character. Even these duties will be far less onerous than they now are, when we have become intelligent enough to see that the best way for every man to secure his own freedom and comfort is to respect the freedom and the rights of others.

It remains an open question whether at some time during this century it may not be temporarily needful for the State to undertake the restraint of offences against the intellect, such as the publication of false or grossly exaggerated news, and of matter calculated to encourage vice, as betting. No doubt the balance of advantage is in favour of the entire freedom of the Press; but it cannot be denied that this freedom is at present greatly abused. It would be easy to name a dozen types of periodicals whose forcible suppression would be an enormous gain to the public; and in an age so increasingly prone to look to the governing body for assistance in every conceivable matter no one can deny the probability of some legislative steps being taken, when the public first begins to concern itself seriously with public morals. But this possibility is much nearer at hand than the end of this century; at the latter period public opinion will probably be well able to take care of itself, and any laws of the kind I have suggested will, like numerous other forms of legislation, including many now operative, have fallen into desuetude because there will be no temptation to the misdemeanours they are, or may be, framed to repress.

The question of the form which the repression of crime will take a hundred years hence can only be answered if we first endeavour to see what the developments of penology, or the science of punishment, are likely to be during the next hundred years. Naturally, they will have the same tendencies as the society which produces them. We may safely anticipate that the more savage punishments, as death, flogging and painful labour will be eliminated, together with all punishments that are not believed to be reformatory in their character. And even the relatively mild penalty of long imprisonment may to the gentler mind of a new age appear unduly vindictive.

Punishment will be regarded as a diminishingly necessary evil; and our "object all sublime" will not be to make it fit the particular crime for which it is awarded, but to make it diminish crime as a whole. Punition as a moral force will be judged according to its effect in two different directions, namely, its force as a means of reforming the convicted individual by preventing his relapse into crime, and its force as a means of deterring other persons from committing the same crimes at all; and of these two the second will be considered greatly the more important in an age that will be logical as well as mild; because it is obviously a greater object to produce an effect upon the minds of a possibly great number than to produce it upon the mind of one culprit. Consequently, although a benevolent solicitude for the reformation of the detected offender will not be excluded from the consideration of future penologists, the deterring from crime of the tempted classes will be much more demanded. As to this, it cannot be questioned that improvements in detection and in legal procedure (eliminating the chances of escape for the guilty without endangering the freedom of the innocent) are capable of accomplishing a great deal more than could possibly be looked for from any alteration in the nature of the punishment used. Experience shows that hitherto a ferocious punishment not very certainly applied does not deter anything like so much as comparatively mild punishment with very little chance of escape. Coining, for instance, is less common now than when coiners were slowly pressed to death under weights, if detected; and the diminution of this crime has not been due to fear of the punishment now long abandoned; neither was that penalty removed from our system of criminal law because it had done its work and stamped out counterfeiting. On the contrary, improvements in the minting of real money, by rendering the detection of counterfeits easy, may be said to have almost eliminated the offence in question, and this result is all the more remarkable when we remember that, owing to the appreciation of gold, real silver shillings, half-crowns and other pieces just as good in assay as the royal mintage could be coined by counterfeiters at a handsome profit.

Our very proper anxiety to avoid every possible chance of committing and punishing the innocent doubtless enables many guilty persons to escape every year; and probably quite half the prisoners acquitted at every assize are really guilty in some degree. The jurisprudence of a hundred years hence will certainly have been so much improved that innocent persons will rarely be accused at all, and that guilty ones will not be able to escape on technical grounds: and with improved detective methods the chances of escape in any given case will be greatly diminished. What punishments are inflicted will be of a reformatory character, and no doubt provisional release, freed from the many crying scandals of the ticket-of-leave system, will play a great part in scientific penology. Recidivism will, of course, be the subject of much sharper punishment. In the meantime, the study of mental science in its relation to crime will have made great strides, and if the views of our own age in regard to heredity should be maintained, a very great source of crime will probably be got rid of altogether, because men and women with just that mental twist which leads to crime will, by one device or another, be absolutely prevented from propagating their race. [31]

It is impossible to work out here the various methods of individual reform applicable to convicts of various sorts, because the nature of these methods must necessarily depend, to a great extent, upon the conditions of a society of which only the most salient and extreme peculiarities can be foreseen even by the most imaginative. But all evidence seems to suggest that actual crime will have become much diminished in amount, while the necessity for dealing with what may be called technical crimes--misdemeanours, and offences against regulations made for the convenience of society rather than for the defence of life and morals--will probably have been reduced to a minimum, partly by the intelligence of the population, and partly through the fact that the minor offences will have ceased to be dealt with by law, and will be sufficiently repressed by natural causes. Not only, therefore, will the amount of necessary restraint become less, through the diminution of crime and of temptation to crime, but the employment of legal restraint will be less demanded, the latter being recognised as, when avoidable, dangerous to public morals. And, while criminal law will be less active, civil litigation will also probably be much less heavy. The same causes which will tend to make us more careful to avoid committing offences against the common right of others, will make us more scrupulous to perform contracts. And as a consequence of the improved morality which there seems every reason to anticipate, a hundred years hence, it will no doubt have become possible to execute a reform which many thinkers have desiderated as an element of perfected polity. It is hardly necessary here to recapitulate the arguments in favour of the contention that the cost of civil suits should be borne, as the cost of criminal prosecutions is always supposed to be borne, by the State. That the man who brings successfully an action at law, or successfully defends one, should be able to do so only at an expense to himself, is against public policy: and there are even now numerous cases every year in which even the unsuccessful party in a lawsuit is really doing the public a service. In a perfect state of public morality he would always be doing so: and in a hundred years' time he will certainly be more often worthy of public thanks than he is now--he will be less often seeking to impose or defend a wrong. As matters stand, it is notorious that the grant of costs following the judgment in a civil suit is only a partial relief to the successful suitor. He has to pay his solicitor more than his solicitor can obtain leave from the taxing master to collect from the other side; while if (as not infrequently happens) the other side cannot pay, the costs awarded by the Court have to be borne by the winner of the suit. It is a frequent reply of dishonest defendants, when threatened with legal proceedings, that they "will meet the plaintiff in the Bankruptcy Court." On the other hand, a man will often submit to oppression rather than be subjected to the expense of even a successful defence. Every litigant who maintains his right, whether as plaintiff or defendant, renders very much the same service to the public which we often hear applauded on the part of persons who "come forward to prosecute" in criminal or misdemeanour cases. He is assisting to make probity profitable and evasion dangerous; in other words, he is subserving public morality and helping to repress dishonesty. It would be much to the public advantage that his costs should be borne by the public purse, and borne generously, every expense legitimately incurred being allowed him. Logically, he ought also to receive a sufficient, and even a fairly liberal, solatium for his trouble and loss of time: and an honest loser ought to be able to receive a certificate from the court entitling him to the same amenities, the withholding of which would constitute a deterrent penalty against factious litigation. But it may be urged on practical grounds that to make the path of the litigant too easy would lead to too much invocation of the law, and that the full recognition of the public usefulness of litigants must be postponed to the millennium--which age of ideal perfection will not occur (it may be thought necessary to concede) a hundred years hence. And it is not difficult to imagine means by which the public can be protected against the factious and unnecessary litigation to which, in the absence of some safeguard, we should certainly be exposed. The plaintiff might be required to obtain some sort of fiat, such as is required now before a suit of criminal libel can be prosecuted: and there would be no hardship in the litigant who failed to obtain the fiat being left to bear his own expenses up to the time of failure, though, in the event of his success, he would of course have them repaid. The legal machinery for obtaining permission to sue need not be made too complicated: it must not be allowed to develop into a sort of preliminary trial. Probably some sort of arrangement as the above will be instituted a hundred years hence, and all law-costs borne by the State, except in the case of obvious dishonesty or bad faith; the trouble and loss of time necessarily incurred exercising a restraining influence upon the litigious.

In regard to the general machinery of the law it would be tedious to attempt to foresee all the reforms of which the growing complexity of human affairs will certainly impose the necessity upon us. The clumsiness of a system by which important civil cases have to be tried three times, in ways differing in detail, before a final decision is reached, needs no insisting upon: and there is a manifest inconsistency in the fact that an action about a matter worth £101 can be twice appealed, while a man tried for his life, or something even more important than life, has no appeal at all against an adverse verdict, except to a secret tribunal of Civil Service clerks--for in the "commutation" of sentences the Crown stands for the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary is necessarily obliged to depend upon his assistants, who in their turn may very possibly have to derive their information from officials whose credit would be damaged if some fact favourable to the prisoner came out. To admit this inconsistency is not by any means equivalent to admitting the necessity for courts of criminal appeal: and anyone who knows the methods of criminal jurisprudence in the United States must recognise that such courts are capable of abuse highly dangerous to public morality, so dependent upon respect for law. But with the great increase in scrupulosity and in the mildness of public temper which the tendencies of human development clearly vaticinate for the next century, it seems impossible to doubt that some method will be adopted by which criminal trials can be reviewed, even though the class of cases in which the necessity for review is most often mentioned now will no doubt have disappeared with the abolition of capital punishment. And it does not seem likely to be beyond the ingenuity of the coming time to discover some means by which civil cases can be settled in one trial, instead of requiring three, without danger to the justice of any individual suit.

It is sometimes questioned whether trial by jury will continue a feature of modern civilisation. The remark of a legal cynic that "the man with a good case is always safe with a judge, while the man with a bad case has always a chance with a jury," is sufficiently sound to make it a question whether juries are worth the trouble given to the members of them, and the vast amount of additional labour which their employment inflicts on the courts of which they are a feature. The conditions which make trial by jury "the blest palladium of our liberties" have passed away in civilised countries, and to a great extent in Ireland. It is no doubt characteristic of the British people that we should so long as this have retained the use of juries in civil suits, though even here there are many cases (especially in divorce and libel) where the average common sense of a jury is really helpful to the judge, and constitutes a check upon his prejudice or impatience. There was a time when the jury was a genuine safeguard against oppression in private as well as Crown cases, and it is like us, as a nation, to have retained them when their usefulness in this respect was happily obsolete. But it seems to the writer pretty certain that in civil trials juries will have been dispensed with long before the end of this century, and this dispensation will probably be the stepping-stone to a system whereby criminal causes will be tried by a bench of judges, instead of by a judge and jury. The whole tendency of modern conditions (in which must be included our growing, and highly discreditable, individual impatience of the trouble of jury-service) seems to point to this. [32]

Reforms of judicial procedure of course constitute only a relatively small part of the legislative work which will have been accomplished by the end of the century. Apart from the work of gradually remodelling the law with the idea (which nowhere seems to suggest itself to present-day legislators) of making it act beneficially upon public character, there will no doubt be a vast amount of work for the various parliaments of the world in codifying existing statute- and common-law systems, which in all communities have fallen into complexity and confusion of a degree which makes them highly unsatisfactory instruments of social protection: and there will also be a great amount of constructive legislation, particularly in regard to the tenure of land, to the simplification of conveyancing, to a more intelligent machinery of contracts, to the equitable handling of such accidental or conditional sources of wealth as we call "unearned increment" and the discovery of unexpected minerals, to the useful limitation of inheritance, and to other matters too numerous to be safely named. And in order that these great works may be accomplished, it is quite certain that, not only in England, but in all those States where really free parliaments exist, great reforms will have been found necessary, and will have become so much a part of the machinery of legislation and administration a hundred years hence, that our descendants will hardly be able to realise how Government was ever carried on without them. Indeed, it is by the difficulty of administering anything at all by parliamentary methods--every year more evidently breaking down--rather than by the desire to undertake large schemes of legislation, that statesmen will in a very short time be forced to initiate the changes whose full development will have become time-honoured by the end of this century. The organisation of political opposition in parliaments has reached a point which makes it evident that before long the minority in parliaments will have become a nonentity. The minority, in fact, has already, here and in other countries (of which the Austro-Hungarian empire is, at the moment, the most noticeable example), become so powerful for obstruction of business that, by a sort of paradox, its power is on the eve of complete destruction. At St Stephen's the effect of obstruction working in this manner is plainly visible. Whatever party is in power will always, so long as the existing system continues, be obliged to silence the opposition by the force of parliamentary machine; and whatever party is in power will always be accused of tyranny and autocracy by the other party. In practice there is no method by which any important government measure can be passed through the House of Commons except by force. It is a mere farce to make a show of debating the details in committee. Naturally the Opposition, when it does not want the measure passed at all, will delay its passage to the last possible moment, and will make its enactment impossible unless a term is set to the deliberations of committee of the whole house. Whether the time granted by the Government be long or short makes no difference: it is impossible to pass any serious and complex bill except by the closure. In other words, the Government (which practically means the Civil Service officials and parliamentary draftsmen employed by the particular department concerned with the bill--the Home Office, the Local Government Board Office, the Exchequer, or what not) must triumph. Even the suggestions of individual supporters of the administration in power must be ignored, unless there is a cave which might turn out the ministry altogether. In detail, therefore, we are governed, not by Parliament, but by the permanent officials, so far as really important Government measures are concerned: and it is quite evident that bills introduced by private members will very soon not be considered at all. The private member is rapidly being reduced to nothingness by the force of parliamentary development. Meantime, the waste of public time by the introduction and debating of bills which the Opposition eventually succeeds in destroying, is appalling, and of course it is aggravated by the idiotic rule which destroys at the end of each session all the work which has been begun and not completed. The system, not less imbecile, in which opinion is ascertained in Parliament is another great time-waster. It is only necessary to ask for a single moment what our grandsons, or even the younger of our children, will think of a Parliament in which a vote was taken by solemnly walking through lobbies, with elaborate arrangements for counting and checking the members (when it might all be done by the simple use of an electric signal in front of each seat in the chamber) in order to perceive the miserable inadequacy of even the mechanical arrangements of all the parliaments of the world. And if even all the crass follies and mediæval stupidities of modern parliamentary arrangements were reformed, as nine-tenths of them could be by any competent board composed of a few engineers, electricians and architects, we should still be in possession of a legislative machine such as the intelligence of a hundred years hence would laugh to scorn if its restoration were suggested.

Nor is this all. The whole institution of parliaments, as a contrivance for giving effect to the will of the peoples, has long been utterly inadequate, and must be reformed from the bottom. We elect members to carry out schemes of legislation and forms of policy never fully, and sometimes not even partially, formulated, upon which, even if they were set out in full detail, we could not possibly have any complete influence in giving our votes. For instance, let us suppose that, at a general election, one party wishes to increase the Navy, to abolish publicans' compensation, and to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister: while the other party not only objects to all these three proposals but also wishes to put a protective tariff on foodstuffs and machinery, to give Home Rule to Ireland, and to disestablish the Church of England. A Home Ruler who was also a teetotaler could not vote for either party without outraging one or other of his convictions. A believer in the support of our national supremacy who also considered that the Church ought to be disestablished would have to choose between voting against the increase of the Navy or against the Disestablishment: and the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill advocate must vote against all the proposals on the other side (all of which he may agree with) if he do not wish to assist in perpetuating what he believes to be a hardship to his fellow-countrymen, and very possibly to some of his own friends, or to himself. And any of these perplexed voters, having somehow contrived to strike a balance with his conscience, and to give a vote, will, perhaps, in a year's, or in six years', time find that he has been the instrument of placing in power an administration which is now proceeding to pass measures that he abhors. He has no redress. Nor, abandoning the extreme case of such highly-mixed policies as I have endeavoured to amuse the reader by imagining, has the voter who changes his mind, or who finds that he has been bamboozled with false promises, any means of helping to undo the harm he has helped to do. It used to be said that, on an average, parliamentary government worked well--that it carried out in a rough way the will of the people. But the peoples of a hundred years hence are going to be much more particular about matters of such high importance. They are not going to be content with a rough approximation in matters of the very highest moment when they are able to secure with perfect accuracy most of their wishes in matters of quite minor importance. They will not be satisfied to know exactly what time it is at any moment of the day (as of course they will know, all instruments for time-measuring being controlled by wireless synchronisation) and not to know exactly what their rulers are going to do about matters upon which the very fate of the country may depend. Neither will they have remained so stupid as to think that whatever one body of politicians considers right must be right and that whatever another body thinks right must necessarily be wrong. It is quite certain that in a really intelligent age so clumsy a system as that of party government will have been relegated to oblivion.

The political machinery to replace it will be of a nature determined by causes much too complex to be foreseen, except in the merest outline, as yet; and probably it will, like most political institutions, be a development rather than an invention. The system, already talked of, by which any matter of great national importance should be made a referendum, the subject of a direct vote by the whole nation, is no doubt capable of ingeniously modified arrangement so as to provide for its expeditious use, without undue interference with the course of ordinary business. But obviously this device is only capable of limited application, and it could not be employed at all, without producing dangerous confusions and incongruities, except in a community whose political education had made strides almost inconceivable in the light of our present limited experience. It is difficult to see how the general legislative business of a considerable nation could be carried on unless by committees of a parliamentary character; and limited as we are by the history of political institutions arising out of states of public intelligence which will have become contemptible in comparison with the intelligence of the next century, there is a difficulty in conceiving how such committees or parliaments could work out otherwise than on some sort of party system. But the analogy of progress in general may help us to a conjecture, which is here offered only for what it is worth. All progress, as we know it, is a development from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. One form of progress consists of the development of specialism. At one time, and not so very long ago, every housewife made her own jams, pickles, perfumes, essences and condiments, which are now purchased ready made. A man of science, in Davy's time, often embraced a number of different branches as his province; whereas now even a single science is seldom completely handled by any individual professor, entomologists differentiating themselves from general biologists, and coleopterists from general entomologists. Does it not appear likely, then, that the functions of the politician and of the legislator will presently be differentiated, with great advantage to nations? In a legislature of the present time professional law-makers are numerically few, and not very highly regarded. While in a matter relatively unimportant, like coach-building, civilisation has made specialism necessary; in a matter of the highest importance, the making of a nation's laws, we continue to trust the general practitioner, and the suggestion that specialists alone should be employed in it would probably awaken a torrent of objection not unmingled with execration. But specialism of all sorts will have extended its sway to such an extent a hundred years hence that the likeliest solution of the difficulties at present envisaged is that the business of law-making will be relegated to a specially qualified and specially educated class, and that parliaments, if they exist at all, will have nothing to do with it, but will concern themselves with what they are often rather contumeliously told now is not their business (though it ought to be); namely, the management of international policy. The way in which this evolution will come about is, moreover, fairly easy to imagine. At some time during the century the manifold confusions, inconsistencies and evident inconveniences of the existing corpus of the law are pretty sure to require drastic and laborious treatment, which can only be administered by professional experts. At the same time, the public, having awakened to the ludicrous fact that laws are passed in every session of every Parliament in the world, which, when they come to be administered, break down because they have either been so stupidly and unimaginatively conceived, or so clumsily expressed in the statutes which embody them, that practical working immediately reveals their fatal defects. A clever young lawyer once said to the present writer that he knew of no intellectual pleasure so delightful as that of discovering how to circumvent the provisions of an Act of Parliament. This diverting, if immoral, remark illustrates the faults of a social system in which laws are made chiefly by persons having little experience in the working of laws, and elected to that duty by persons having no such experience at all. Having in mind the fact that international law is already relegated practically to specialists, it requires no great effort of imagination to foresee that the Hercules that will cleanse the Augean stable of the Statute Book will be a committee of professors of law. And once the public has become familiarised with the idea, what more natural than that a similar body should be formed to provide against such legislative blunders as we were all recently laughing at, when, having provided for the restraint of habitual drunkards by placing them on what was called the black list, Parliament presently learned that it had so framed the law that no one could be black-listed except by his own consent? The development from this to a system by which laws would not merely be amended, but devised ab ovo, by professional legislators, is easy to foresee; and with properly-devised precautions to ensure that the laws created shall express the will of a sovereign people sufficiently educated in political duty to possess a will worthy of consideration, probably no better solution of the legislative difficulty can be imagined.

The conduct of foreign affairs is a matter much less easy to reform. If despotisms were not such desperately untrustworthy things, a good sound autocracy would probably be the best form of government for the function of conducting the affairs of one nation with another. The extraordinary diplomatic success of Russia is an evidence of this. But Russia also illustrates the drawbacks of despotism. In its management of foreign affairs Russia has (despite the habit which its departments occasionally display of acting in conflict with one another) beaten all the civilised nations. Russia has a "continuous" foreign policy. There are no changes of ministers to nullify each other's work and to encourage the diplomatists of other nations to procrastinate and shilly-shally over negotiations in the hope that a general election will bring in a new set of statesmen, easier to deal with. And Russia can herself procrastinate, prevaricate and play all sorts of tricks, neglect her promises, ignore her pledges, and prosecute her cryptic aims, without the smallest fear of a question in Parliament to spoil her game by letting all the world into her dark and devious secrets. The more a nation becomes democratised, the less competent it is to manage its foreign policy against less democratic nations, and a truly popular Government is, in the present state of the world, about the worst conceivable instrument for that purpose. With an ever-increasing democratisation of all governments such as we are sure to witness during this century, foreign offices of the present kind will become more and more incompetent until some sort of machinery is invented in their place.

Nor will the disappearance of the ultimate resort to arms, as a possibility always threatening in the background, tend to improve matters. It will, on the contrary, make them worse. There can be no doubt that the awful fear of war, which must haunt the pillow of every statesman in our day with dreams of pitiable horror, does exercise an influence in settling controversies which, without this terror, would drag their slow length along from generation to exasperated generation. And if we try to imagine that the increased conscientiousness of a better time will help nations to deal more honourably with each other, it is to be feared that even the vast progress of the quick-moving century on which we have entered will not suffice to bind the princes to its pleasure and teach their senators wisdom. It is unfortunately in regard to honour between nation and nation that conscience develops most slowly, and many a man who would scorn to trick a fellow-citizen, or even defraud a railway company, and who would quite possibly hesitate before smuggling a box of cigars through the custom-house, will calmly advocate acts of international dishonesty and oppression abhorrent to any conscientious mind.

There can be no doubt that the most deleterious influence of our times, which encourages nations to delay and deny to each other justice and the fulfilment of solemn obligations, is the habit of waiting upon the chances of a minister's fall, and a resulting change of policy. So long as almost any day may bring a new set of statesmen, predisposed against anything which their predecessors may have approved, diplomacy will be disfigured by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain: and the logical twentieth of the centuries may be trusted to perceive this. Consequently some method will have to be devised by which a continuous foreign policy may be made compatible with the performance of a nation's will. And here the wiser nature of the new age will assist the constructive genius of the reformer. No doubt the habit of changing our minds on the basic principles of government about once every six years will have been eradicated. Peoples will deliberate more intelligently upon the important questions which they decide by their votes: and it will no longer be thought--or rather, we shall no longer act as if we thought--that a modification of general opinion in regard (say) to Home Rule for Ireland must necessarily carry with it a change of opinion as to whether it is desirable to extend our influence in Afghanistan. When this error is abandoned, probably foreign affairs will no longer be made part and parcel of the work of the same set of men that is elected to manage domestic policy. It will then be possible for the people to express--as they rarely have any opportunity to express under the present system--their sovereign will in regard to international matters. And here, as everywhere, responsibility will certainly exercise an educative influence. When men intelligently realise that by their votes they are deciding the fate of their country, they will deliberate long before yielding a decision so momentous. Inasmuch as the foreign affairs of any nation are truly understood only by a very limited class, because very few people are willing to give up enough of their leisure to the studies necessary for such an understanding, it seems reasonable to think that one feature of the polity of the year 2000 may be the limitation of the right to vote on foreign affairs to men and women who have demonstrated in some sufficient manner their competence to assist in directing the action of their representatives in matters so intricate. The increased leisure with which other reforms already foreseen will endow the people will of course facilitate the acquirement of this competence, and the right to vote on foreign affairs will doubtless be a coveted social distinction, subserving the perennial love of titles and the childlike pleasure of having letters after one's name. Nor need we be too much daunted in this conjecture by the whispered word "oligarchy." When oligarchy really means government by those best qualified to govern--the nature of this "bestness" being intelligently determined--oligarchy will be recognised as the most satisfactory form of government: and in order to exclude objectionable one-sidedness in the method of selecting voters for the high duty of guarding the nation's honour, no doubt some method of selection by vote can be discovered, free from liability to reintroduce the baleful evil of party.

Coming now to other functions of a State, the most obvious subject for conjecture is that suggested by the tendency in recent times of governments (and following their example of municipalities) to engage in trade. The comment which gained currency over a decade ago, that we were all socialists then, is still more justified now. Will States continue their increasing practice of usurping the place of private adventurers? Will railways, canals, telephonic and teleautographic systems, street conveyances, and so forth, be owned and controlled by various public authorities, after education, some other functions, including the feeding and clothing of poor children during school age, and the care of the unemployed (which States before long will certainly have embraced) have by a more enlightened polity been returned to the proper hands? The whole question of whether socialism is a probable solution of the difficulties which its advocates believe it capable of solving is here involved. Applying our familiar principle of estimating the tendencies of the future by the trend of events in the past, it seems certain that there will for a good many years immediately to come be an increase in the functions assumed by the State: but that the whole plunge into socialism will not be undertaken. For, while measures undisguisedly socialistic in character are more and more advocated and adopted, the open principle of State socialism seems to find less support every year. Whenever distress becomes prevalent, plenty of writers, for instance, loudly denounce Governments for not finding work for everyone who fails to find work for himself--so long as he is a man! (No one appears to think it the Government's duty to find work for women.) But when socialism is openly propounded, the same authors just as vehemently denounce the socialistic system to which this principle of regarding the State as the duty-bound employer of the workless clearly tends. What will most likely happen is that devices, more and more socialistic, for dealing with emergencies, and inconveniences of various sorts, will be adopted and maintained until their own inconvenience and injustice have made themselves felt: and then a more reasonable age will get rid of them--better remedies having meantime been discovered--at the same time perceiving their deleterious effect upon private responsibility, and wondering why it has tolerated the old methods so long. In other words, socialistic experiments will have demonstrated their own evils before the habit of indulging in them has gone so far as to allow States to drift the whole way into socialism. It is even possible that the example of some single nation, drifting thus far, and setting up a socialistic State, may serve as a useful warning to the rest of the world, and determine the gradual abandonment of the dangerous tendencies which will have increasingly manifested themselves. For it is certain that, unless in exceptional and abnormal instances--of which the Australian Commonwealth is very likely to furnish an example--political systems will always continue to develop by evolutionary, and not by revolutionary, steps. We shall pass gradually, and by a process of construction and elimination, from one condition to another, until the very greatly improved system of government and administration whose period of existence I have ventured to place at about the beginning of the next century, has become general throughout the world.

We may, for instance, very easily imagine how a more intelligent electorate will abolish some abuses, by considering the condition of the post-office department of this and other countries. It is hardly thinkable that, during any period of the world's history, the business of carrying letters can be thrown open to anyone who chooses to undertake it. If there were nothing to be dealt with except the domestic correspondence of each nation, probably it would be a great deal better that it should be thus thrown open to competition: it is hardly likely that the vast business of international correspondence can ever be satisfactorily conducted, except by administrations acting in the name and behalf of every State. But there is not the least reason for thinking that the abuses which deface the postal department of this and every other nation will be perpetual. The British post-office contributes annually a "profit" of several millions sterling to the Exchequer. Every person who writes a letter, therefore, is taxed for doing it. In proportion to the intelligence, commercial enterprise, family affection, or professional diligence by which he is prompted to use correspondence, every one of us is compelled to contribute something more to the up-keep of the State than his neighbour who is too lazy, too ignorant or too callous to trouble himself with letter-writing. No doubt it is impossible, without a loss which would amount to subsidising, in an equally objectionable manner, the users of the post-office, to conduct that department except at a profit of some sort: but it surely will not be pretended that it could not be conducted without exacting such a surplus as the post-office does annually contribute to the Budget. The vicious manner in which we treat the postal service as a sort of trading department, expected to yield the Chancellor of the Exchequer a convenient sum towards his expenditure, is illustrated by the disgraceful underpayment of the minor officials, such as postmen, small post-masters, telegraph messengers and the like. The post-office buys its labour in the cheapest market: there is but too much reason for the belief that it treats with oppressive harshness attempts on the part of its servants to better their wages by organisation: and when reproved in the House of Commons for sweating his work-people, a postmaster-general can always reply, amid applause, that he dare not embarrass his right-honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The polity of the enlightened future will assuredly desist from penalising intelligence, enterprise, and the other commendable characteristics which tend to increase a man's correspondence; and the postmaster-general who will be praised a hundred years hence will be that one who has succeeded in managing his department with the smallest possible surplus. We have only to envisage the obvious justice of this ambition to perceive the objections which attach to the adoption of trading functions by the State. Though it is very likely that railways will be nationalised in this, as they have been nationalised or subsidised in many other countries, it is quite certain that if we do nationalise them we shall be compensated by none of the advantages which make us tolerant, and even unconscious, of the abuses of the British post-office--itself in most respects one of the least imperfect of bureaucracies. The faults generally found with railways are precisely the faults of bureaucracy, and in proportion as railways become more and more united in their policy, through amalgamation and arrangements for mutual assistance, those faults constantly increase. The same will presently be found true of all governmental usurpations of private enterprise: and it cannot be doubted that in this, as in so many other respects, the functions of governments will be greatly reduced a hundred years hence.

One subject which cannot be neglected in any attempt to foresee the conditions of the law in the next century is the delicate and difficult one of marriage laws: and on no subject are differences of opinion so numerous and so acute. All that seems to be generally agreed is that under the present system inconveniences and immoralities occur: and it is (of course) supposed to be a corollary that if the system were changed these inconveniences and immoralities would disappear. This is the usual method of considering social difficulties. Hardly anyone will consent to base plans for the future upon experience of the past. It is always presumed that new laws can reform abuses, without changes in the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the abuses. One class of thinkers, despairing of moral improvement, considers that, immorality being irremediable, the only thing to be done is to give it sanction; as it must exist, it must be made respectable and unscandalous. Another set of reformers would penalise immorality by forbidding the guilty party in a divorce suit to re-marry, just as there are people who would prevent the physically unfit from marrying at all. Both forget that the prohibition of legal unions is much more likely to lead to an increase of irregular connections than to produce any other effect. No doubt we could improve the physical standard of the legitimately born by the prohibition last digressively mentioned: but it would be at the expense of an increase in illegitimate births accompanied by the additional disadvantage of bodily weakness. Similarly, so far from the prohibition of re-marriage restraining the immorally disposed, it is much more likely that it would encourage them: the fact that a co-respondent could not be called upon to marry the woman divorced in consequence of her guilty association with him would hardly act generally as a deterrent; while, if he had been willing to face the probable consequences of publicity, expense and inconvenience attending a liaison with a woman under coverture, the co-respondent would not think it necessary to abandon his confederate, if he wished, and she were willing, to continue their connection after all the penalties had been suffered, merely because the law prevented a regular union. It is agreed by all jurists that the only justification for the greater severity with which matrimonial infidelity is visited on women as compared with men is the greater social degradation with which society visits women who have offended. To penalise their offence by prohibiting re-marriage would only perpetuate their degradation, and does in fact so perpetuate and increase it in countries where the condemned party in a divorce is forbidden the altar.

On the other hand, to recognise a sort of promiscuity, as some writers have suggested that we shall be obliged to do, would probably be attended by worse effects than the bold and straightforward acceptance of polygamy as a necessary remedy for the excess of feminine population, which a writer of letters to the shocked and astonished newspapers of this city recently proposed. Neither expedient is capable of being adopted: nor does there seem much likelihood that public morality can be improved by legislation, though it is certain to be much improved by the spontaneous amelioration of public sentiment. No doubt in one or two particulars the marriage laws will gradually undergo amendment. It will be realised that it is much more immoral to compel unwilling couples to live together matrimonially, than to set them free to remedy one of the most hideous of all possible mistakes. The difficulty of determining what shall be done where one party wishes for divorce, while the other does not, is greater: but on the whole it will probably be considered more conducive to morality to dissolve the marriage here, after a precautionary and experimental period of provisional separation, than to insist upon its perpetuation. That age will only be ripe for such a reform as this, which, by moral progress, has rendered intolerable the position of a libertine capable of entering into matrimony with the deliberate intention of getting out of it again when it ceases to be attractive, and in which the social estimate of a person who acted in the same manner through instability of character would be not much better. In any reform of the kind suggested, it would no doubt be arranged that pecuniary liabilities, allocated to the support and education of children, would follow the party insisting on divorce; and this also would act as a check upon dishonest contracts of marriage.

Thus, for any radical improvement in the system of matrimonial connections, we must look to a corresponding improvement in the spirit of the age, and the first step in advance will have been taken when marriage ceases to be the only legal contract which is enforced notwithstanding the ignorance of a contracting party as to the engagement entered into. The frequency of divorce petitions will be greatly diminished from the time we get rid of the idiotic and almost incredibly wicked convention by which we take every possible precaution we can think of to ensure that a girl, when she marries, shall have no possible means of knowing to what she is committing herself. No more ingenious contrivance for obtaining marital infelicity could be imagined. The next step will have been taken when it is recognised as disgraceful for parents to put pressure upon the inclinations of their children of either sex to induce them to marry, and when social execration renders such pressure impossible. Concurrently with this, or as a result of it, a third step will be some abatement of our present entire neglect of any demand for good character in a bridegroom who would be outraged if he thought that the least aspersion could be suggested concerning his bride. In other words, the greatest improvements in the status of the world with regard to matrimony will be effected when we recognise the claim of woman to be made the equal of man in knowledge, in discretion and in social rights. No legislative reform as yet ever suggested could have anything like as much effect in removing the evils under which we groan, in respect to matrimony, as this natural and inevitable development.

Naturally the improvement in the position of women in the new age will not arrive at a bound, nor will their rights in relation to marriage be unaccompanied by other rights at present withheld, and perhaps not always unreasonably withheld. On the contrary, the recognition of one set of rights will facilitate and accelerate the recognition of the other. It is generally agreed that the tendency of the sexes is to become less divergent, intellectually and morally, for reasons connected with what Spencer calls "the less early arrest of individual evolution, and the result everywhere seen throughout the organic world, of a self-preserving power inversely proportionate to the race-preserving power." [33]

As it will have been realised, long before the advent of the next century, that the surest way to improved capacity is to be found in increased responsibility, women will not, a hundred years hence, be allowed or compelled to shirk their political obligations. We may see with half an eye that every year women are becoming more capable, and also more desirous of aiding the counsels of the public: and in some of our Colonies, as well as in some States of the American Union, they are already voting, and voting (as it turns out) with the most wonderful intelligence and usefulness. The influence of the female vote in, for example, New Zealand has been for some time perceptible in the legislation of that highly-enlightened colony: and I never heard anyone object to the results of this influence except persons whose conduct, or the conduct which they approved in their associates, was likely to be inconvenienced by them. It is no doubt true that women are a great deal more fond of demanding that the law should do work which it would be better to leave to natural developments of public character than could be wished: but then so are men, and it is an unquestionable thing that the misdeeds which men more readily condone than women are much more likely to be bad for public morality than those which women condone more freely than men. There is no particular reason for thinking at the present time (though there was ample reason for thinking a few decades ago) that women will be more prone to legislate unnecessarily, and therefore mischievously, than men: and we are in any case bound to pass through a good many years of parliament-worship before we awaken to the fact that the law cannot do everything, and that any reform which is accomplished by the spontaneous influence of public opinion is always a great deal more complete, a great deal more conducive to public self-respect, and a great deal better adjusted to the special requirements of every individual circumstance that it touches, than one which is laboriously and mechanically embodied in statutes which cannot but be imperfect, cannot possibly fail to act oppressively and unjustly in one place or another, and frequently prove to be unworkable from beginning to end.