238 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



its beginnings, and you will find Conscience the 

 first Lawgiver, and Conscience the first Judge. 



Or turn your eyes to the present. Look at Law 

 as a finished product, an organism instinct, as it 

 seems, with life. Can we trace in it any rudimen- 

 tary organs ? Is there one part which suffers from 

 the atrophy of disuse ? It is where the Conscience 

 of man has outgrown the expression of his earlier 

 and less perfect will, or where (shame to us that it 

 is ever so !) the conscience of to-day has fallen 

 short of its own true judgments in the past. Quid 

 leges sine moribus van<z proficiunt? is the moralist's 

 lament. What a vain thing is Law without that 

 which gives it life and authority and truth ! Law, 

 indeed, has learned to reverence personality, it is 

 jealous even of the mystical union of two person- 

 alities in Holy Marriage, lest it should carry with 

 it anything of the old idea of possession of the 

 wife by the husband. So careful is it to guard 

 Personality and individual freedom that it treats 

 Marriage not as a mystery, but as a contract. And 

 yet right in the very heart of our civilization is the 

 cancerous growth which is feeding upon the moral 

 life of the people. We talk pompously and in- 

 solently of British freedom, and there is that 

 hideous White Slave trade almost at our doors. 

 We talk of reverence for Personality, and there is 

 a vast organized system of tyranny and oppression, 

 which treats man as a brute beast made for sensu- 



