LAW 91 



lized more or less imperfectly into concrete form. It is 

 what we call applied justice. Unless, therefore, those 

 ideals have become accepted by a decisive majority in 

 a given community, the laws which attempt to crystal- 

 lize them prematurely will be of worse than no effect. 

 They will remain a dead letter. They will not be 

 enforced. And this will ultimately exert a deadening 

 influence on public sentiment, accustoming it, as it 

 does, to seeing the law broken with impunity. Ac- 

 cordingly it seems hardly wise to attempt by law to 

 force an ideal upon a community before its time. 

 Probably one of the hardest things in life for generous- 

 minded spirits who have caught the vision of a higher 

 ideal, is to possess their souls in patience until their 

 ideal has come to be generally accepted. And yet 

 there would seem to be no salvation in law per se. 

 Salvation apparently cannot come from without; it 

 must come from within. Ideals must by the very 

 nature of the case precede the law, which is only crys- 

 tallized ideals. Thus, Christianity is said to have abol- 

 ished slavery among the nations of Christendom; but 

 the ideal of man's equality in the sight of God, and 

 hence before the law, had to come first and be gener- 

 ally accepted, before it could become crystallized suc- 

 cessfully into human law. In like manner, we have 

 already in our law to-day the crystallized ideal that 

 no one shall use his property so as to injure another; 

 and that the social organism is justified in thus pro- 

 tecting itself against the abuse of private property 

 rights, goes without saying. But this, like Confucius' 



