DIVISION F SOCIAL REGULATION 



(Hull 2, September 20, 10 a. m.) 

 SPEAKER: PROFESSOR A. LAWRENCE LOWELL, Harvard University. 



SOCIAL REGULATION 



BY A. LAWRENCE LOWELL 



[A. Lawrence Lowell, Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard Univer- 

 sity, b. Boston, Massachusetts, December 13, 1856. A.B. Harvard, 1877; 

 LL.B. ibid. 1880. Author of Essays on Government; Governments and Parties 

 in Continental Europe, etc.; joint author, with Judge F. C. Lowell, of Transfer 

 of Stock in Corporations; with Prof. H. Morse Stephens, of Colonial Civil 

 Service.] 



IT has been said that the object of every writer is to draw a new 

 diagonal line through the field of human knowledge. Men love to 

 point out the connection between things apparently so far apart 

 as the spots on the sun and economic crises, or as the invention of 

 bills of exchange at Venice and the rise of the mendicant orders. 

 But the topic assigned to me at this Congress, " The Unity and 

 Inner Relations of the Political, Legal, and Social Efforts of Society," 

 has little of the charm of novelty. The path is well trodden; and, 

 until a new philosophic light breaks forth, whatever is said on this 

 subject must be trite; what can be said in a short address must 

 obviously be superficial. 



Let us take, first, the relation between politics and jurisprudence, 

 using the term politics, not in the narrow sense in which it is currently 

 employed, to denote the struggles of political parties, but in the 

 larger sense of the conduct of public affairs. 



Law both provides the framework within which political life goes 

 on, and it is also the result of that life. It is like the shell of a mol- 

 lusk, or the trunk of a tree. 



Whatever definition we take of law, whether we regard it as the 

 command of a superior, or accept the theory that it rests upon in- 

 trinsic natural justice, we may say that it is that part of the rules 

 of human conduct which is enforced, or at least may be enforced, by 

 public authority; such a definition, although vague, is wide enough 

 to include on the one hand primitive law, where the public author- 

 ity is rudimentary, and on the other hand public international 

 law, a body of rules which a number of civilized nations habitu- 

 ally obey. 



Now so far as politics does not deal with pure questions of persons, 



