THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 157 



vidual has no rights but what the community may equitably over- 

 ride ; and they are now saying, " It shall go hard but we will better 

 the instruction," and override individual rights altogether. 



Legislative misdeeds of the classes above indicated are in large 

 measure explained, and reprobation of them mitigated, when we look 

 at the matter from afar off. They have their root in the error that 

 society is a manufacture ; whereas it is a growth. Neither the culture 

 of past times nor the culture of the present time has given to any 

 considerable number of people a scientific conception of a society — a 

 conception of it as having a natural structure in which all its insti- 

 tutions, governmental, religious, industrial, commercial, etc., etc., are 

 interdependently bound — a structure which is in a sense organic. Or 

 if such a conception is nominally admitted, it is not believed in such 

 way as to be operative on conduct. Contrariwise, incorporated human- 

 ity is very commonly thought of as though it were like so much dough 

 which the cook can mold at will into pie-crust, or puff, or tartlet. 

 The communist shows us unmistakably that he thinks of the body 

 politic as admitting of being shaped thus or thus at will ; and the tacit 

 implication of many acts of Parliament is that aggregated men, twisted 

 into this or that arrangement, will remain as intended. 



It may indeed be said that, even irrespective of this erroneous con- 

 ception of a society as a plastic mass instead of as an organized body, 

 facts forced on his attention hour by hour should make every one 

 skeptical as to the success of this or that proposed way of changing a 

 people's actions. Alike to the citizen and to the legislator, home ex- 

 periences daily supply proofs that the conduct of human beings balks 

 calculation. He has given up the thought of managing his wife, and 

 lets her manage him. Children on whom he has tried now reprimand, 

 now punishment, now suasion, now reward, do not respond satisfac- 

 torily to any method ; and no expostulation prevents their mother 

 from treating them in ways he thinks mischievous. So, too, his deal- 

 ings with his servants, whether by reasoning or by scolding, rarely 

 succeed for long :] the falling short of attention, or punctuality, or 

 cleanliness, or sobriety, leads to constant changes. Yet, difficult as he 

 finds it to deal with humanity in detail, he is confident of his ability 

 to deal with embodied humanity. Citizens, not one-thousandth of 

 whom he knows, not one-hundredth of whom he ever saw, and the 

 great mass of whom belong to classes having habits and modes of 

 thought of which he has but dim notions, he has no doubt will act in 

 certain ways he foresees, and fulfill ends he wishes. Is there not a mar- 

 velous incongruity between premises and conclusion ? 



One might have expected that whether they observed the implica- 

 tions of these domestic failures, or whether they contemplated in every 

 newspaper the indications of a social life too vast, too varied, too in- 

 volved, to be even vaguely pictured in thought, men would have entered 



