THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 653 



" We are assured, on what appeared unexceptionable testimony, that 

 a terrible constitutional disease was undermining the health and 

 vigor of the nation, and especially destroying innocent women and 

 children." 



And then note the startling circumstance that while so erroneous 

 a conception of the facts may be spread abroad, there may, by the 

 consequent alarm, be produced a blindness to facts of the most un- 

 questionable kind, established by the ever-accumulating experiences 

 of successive generations. Until quite recently, our forms of judicial 

 procedure embodied the principle that some overt injury must be com- 

 mitted before legal instrumentalities can be brought into play ; and 

 conformity to this principle was in past times gradually brought about 

 by efforts to avoid the terrific evils that otherwise arose. As a Pro- 

 fessor of Jurisprudence reminds us, " the object of the whole compli- 

 cated system of checks and guards provided by English law, and 

 secured by a long train of constitutional conflicts, has been to prevent 

 an innocent man being even momentarily treated as a thief, a mur- 

 derer, or other criminal, on the mere alleged or real suspicion of a po- 

 liceman." Yet now, in the state of groundless fright that has been 

 got up, " the concern hitherto exhibited by the Legislature for the 

 personal liberty of the meanest citizen has been needlessly and reck- 

 lessly lost sight of." ' It is an a priori inference from human na- 

 ture that irresponsible power is sure, on the average of cases, to be 

 grossly abused. The histories of all nations, through all times, teem 

 with proofs that irresponsible power has been grossly abused. The 

 growth of representative governments is the growth of arrangements 

 made to prevent the gross abuse of irresponsible power. Each of our 

 political struggles, ending in a further development of free institutions, 

 has been made to put an encl to some particular gross abuse of irre- 

 sponsible power. Yet the facts thrust upon us by our daily expe- 

 riences of men, verifying the experiences of the whole human race 

 throughout the past, are now tacitly denied and it is tacitly asserted 

 that irresponsible power will not be grossly abused. And all because 

 of a manufactured panic about a decreasing disease, which kills not 

 one-fifteenth of the number killed by scarlet fever, and which takes ten 

 years to destroy as many as diarrhoea destroys in one year. 



See, then, what we have to guard against in collecting sociological 

 data even data concerning the present, and, still more, data concern- 

 ing the past. For testimonies that come down to us respecting by- 

 gone social states, political, religious, julicial, physical, moral, etc., 

 and respecting the actions of particular causes on those social states, 

 have been liable to perversions not simply as great, but greater ; since, 

 while the regard for truth was less, there was more readiness to accept 

 unproved statements. 



1 Prof. Sheldon Amos. See also his late important work, "A Systematic View of the 

 Science of Jurisprudence," pp. 119, 303, 512, 514. 



