HABIT OF HAVING LAW MAKERS AND LAWYERS 8 7 



THE BAD HABIT OF HAVING LAW MAKERS AND LAWYERS 



By JOHN COTTON DANA 



NEWARK, N. J. 



IN the process of social development early societies invented certain 

 customs and institutions to satisfy certain more or less well-defined 

 needs. That is to say, all customs and institutions have had their 

 origins, in part, in sheer utility. All of them were therefore good ; for 

 they all helped, if they did nothing more, to establish and maintain that 

 social stability which is a prime essential to progress. It is probable that 

 we owe our present advanced position to cannibalism in precisely the 

 same sense, though not necessarily in the same degree, in which we owe 

 it to slavery, to polygamy, to autocracy, to monogamy and to property 

 in land. At certain points in society's advance one and all of these 

 customs were demanded by circumstances, were developed and gave hu- 

 manity an uplift. 



These several customs were adopted by social groups of a relatively 

 low order. They were beaten out, as it were, by pressure of adverse cir- 

 cumstances, under the guidance of the barbarous and the semi-civilized. 

 Crude as are many of our methods of so modifying our own customs as 

 to meet wisely the changing conditions of our social life, the methods 

 used in early days were very much cruder. The results were unsatisfac- 

 tory. Cannibalism was doubtless a helpful custom in its day; but was 

 not good for all time and in due course was abandoned. Slavery was 

 more useful and for a longer period. It even helped bring to full flower 

 a very refined civilization. But it demonstrated its own ill effects and 

 was duly abandoned. 



It is obvious that in all customs established in the early days of primi- 

 tive society there are defects. Having been devised in a society of the 

 socially unskilled they must all partake of a certain coarseness and 

 crudity, and they must have fitted but ill the needs for which they were 

 devised. If one of them by rare chance proved perfectly adapted to its 

 purpose in the society for which and by which it was fashioned, it could 

 not possibly fit the far more advanced and far more complex society into 

 which the crude society gradually developed. 



Now the law, meaning the power behind the law ; and the law, mean- 

 ing both rules given by legislators and judges and legislators and judges 

 themselves ; and the law, meaning the technique of its alignment as prac- 

 tised by a privileged class, the lawyers — the law in all these three forms 

 or aspects, is a social eject of extreme antiquity. It is one of those 



