The Evolution of Amis and Armor. 185 



iron-plate and stouter gun ? It is a contest sure to result 

 at last in a dead weight of legislation, too large for society 

 to carry. Crime in it, as the assailing force, will continu- 

 ally get ahead, the same as in the struggle between tooth 

 and scale in geology, between thieving and law in England 

 a century ago, and between landlord-legislation and ten- 

 antry-violence in Ireland to-day. And even were such 

 efforts successful, were laws to be made so wise, and a 

 police-force established for their enforcement so strong, as 

 to suppress absolutely, for the time being, all vice and all 

 crime, how inevitably would they lead to a reliance on 

 these agencies alone, and to a relaxation of inward culture 

 that in the end would stop growth and turn society back 

 towards its mollusk-state. Take the use of prohibitory 

 laws in behalf of temperance, whatever their value, a 

 real value in some respects, it must be confessed that just 

 in proportion as they are enforced, the other and finer 

 agencies of the cause, which should act on the drunkard's 

 moral nature to strengthen that, are liable to be dropped, 

 leaving him, while safe from drink simply because he can- 

 not get it, a prey all the more to other, worse vices, whose 

 means of indulgence no laws can stamp out. What 

 children are the weakest and surest to fall, when they 

 grow up and go out into the temptations and trials of 

 actual life ? Those, notedly, who have been sheltered 

 most carefully by home walls and parental care from all 

 contact with evil, rather than those who have been 

 strengthened inwardly, it may be in the very midst of 

 temptation, to take care of themselves. What is the 

 source of all Phariseeism, all hypocrisy, all obedience to 

 the letter and not the spirit of right, social states worse 

 sometimes than open vice ? It is the attempt to make 

 people righteous by precepts rather than by principles ; 

 to protect virtue by an armor of rigid rules instead of by 

 trusting to its own larger development ; so that wisely did 

 the old Apostle to the Gentiles exclaim : " The law worketh 

 wrath." The truth is, there is only one sure way of arm- 

 ing either society or the soul against their foes, the way 

 taught by all the ages, from those of geology up, that of 

 completer inward equipment, putting nature's moral lime 

 into the Ijack-bone of principle, rather than into the shell 

 of statute-books ; building more school-houses and more 

 reformatories in the place of more scaffolds and more jails ; 



