LAW AND JUSTICE 323 



is now placing alongside those as of equal prominence, the claims of social service at home. 

 The British and Foreign Bible Society and the Religious Tract Society are the willing hand- 

 maids of all the churches. The chief event of moment is the celebration by the former in 

 March 1911 of the 3OOth anniversary of the issue of the English Authorised Version. With 

 regard to the question of Bible revision a number of Free Church scholars issued a manifesto 

 in October 1912 stating that in their opinion the time was not ripe in view of the work yet 

 to be done in getting an approximately true text of the original Hebrew and in utilizing 

 recent linguistic discoveries affecting New Testament Greek. A number of them also joined 

 with representative Anglican scholars in a public protest against the issuing of the revised 

 Bible of 1881-85 without the revisers' marginal readings. (A. J. GRIEVE.) 



SECTION VI. LAW AND JUSTICE 



" In the mechanism of modern states," says Sir Henry Maine, " the capital fact is 

 the energy of the legislatures." In the British Empire alone there are 60 legislatures 

 busy at work: in the United States some 50: besides the legislatures of foreign countries 

 Austria has at least a dozen. Looked at superficially the legislative output of these 

 parliaments or legislative councils appears what Cromwell called " a Godless jumble:" 

 but to the philosophic eye, in those multifarious acts and ordinances each several 

 community is writing its history, recording its aspirations and ideals so far as they fall 

 within the sphere of practical politics, readjusting its life to the changed and changing 

 conditions of its environment and national development. There is no more faithful 

 reflection of a people's life in its many sided activities than the pages of its statute-book. 



Surveying the field of legislation during 1909-1913 in the light of this reflection, what 

 are the subjects which we find more especially occupying the minds of the nations at the 

 present moment ? Pre-eminent among them are the status of the worker, and the amel- 

 ioration of his condition, the care of children the rising generation as spes gentis, the 

 prevention as distinguished from the punishment of crime, the health of the community 

 in all its many aspects, the control of the drink traffic, the protection of public morals, 

 marriage and divorce, the segregation and guardianship of the feeble-minded, the assimi- 

 lation of commercial law, the encouragement of agriculture, the organization of trades 

 and professions, and immigration. 



Immigration. To take the last first, one of the rights possessed by the supreme 

 power in every state is, says Chief Justice Griffith of the Australian Commonwealth 

 (Yen v. Christie), "the right to refuse to permit an alien to enter that state and to annex 

 what conditions it pleases to the permission to enter it and to expel or deport home from 

 the state at pleasure." This power of self-protection a large number of states have 

 been freely exercising of late. It is obviously in vain a nation doing all it can to promote 

 the physical, mental, moral and spiritual welfare of its citizens, if a stream of " undesir- 

 ables " the pauper, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the diseased, the drunken, the 

 illiterate is constantly flowing into the state, to weaken or contaminate it. 



United States legislation probably makes the high-water mark in this policy. It 

 prohibits admission of all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane 

 persons, paupers, persons likely to become a public charge, professional beggars, persons 

 afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, or any 

 persons certified by the examining surgeon as mentally or physically defective, if such 

 defect is of a kind to disable them from earning a livelihood, as well as polygamists and 

 anarchists. The duty is cast on the master of a vessel bringing an alien into the United 

 States of furnishing the immigration officer of the port with information as to the 

 character, antecedents and position of the alien. By way of checking the " white 

 slave " traffic foreign prostitutes may be deported. 



In Australia the determination to keep out the undesirable settler has shown no sign 

 of abating. British Honduras has been providing for the expulsion of aliens convicted 

 of felony or other penal offence. The question of immigration and naturalization is still 

 being agitated between Japan and the United States. 



Concurrently with this policy of keeping out undesirables there is a strong desire 

 among the young countries illustrated by the South Australian Act of 1911 to en- 

 courage immigrants of the right sort. 



