72 TRANSACTIONS. I9OI-2 



doing mischief, and to restrain them of that liberty which 

 they so grossly abuse." Law constrains a man's outward acts 

 as a member of society; it does not presume to exercise a 

 moral censorship over him It estira ites his conduct solely 

 in conformity to an external standard. The a*osurdity of 

 attempting to implant the seeds of virtue by phvsical sanctions 

 is well exemplified by the story told of a famous head-master 

 of one of the great English public schools: "Boys," he exclaim- 

 ed at the conclusion of an admonitory harangue, "Boys, if 

 you are not pure in heart, I'll flog you!" 



And so we learn, then, that the domain of the law is not 

 coterminous with that of morality, although there are 

 occasional points of intersection between them. But when 

 we enter upon the study of jurisprudence, we must not only 

 disassociate law from morality; we must, tuthermore, appre- 

 hend the fallacy of the vulgar error that law is not entitled 

 to respect unless it squares in extent and harmonizes in spirit 

 with natural justice. The demand of our friend the ' Man 

 in the Street ' that "law shall be justice," never fails to excite 

 the risibilities of the law-maker. He is prompted to 

 answer: " Discover to me your eternal principles of jusiice, and 

 I shall crystallize them into statutes. I do not find them 

 categorically stated in the Scriptures of revelation; and the 

 Greek poets tell me that Astraea left the earth with the pass- 

 ing of the Golden Age. Failing then to find a code of natural 

 justice sufficient to meet every exigency of civil life, I must 

 create artificial canons of right which will not be perfect be- 

 cause they are of human origin, but which will be the best 

 possible rules of outward conduct to be observed by men as 

 members of society." We would, therefore, bid our thoughtless 

 critic of the law not only to go to the Greek and Roman 

 philosophers but to the classic poets as well, if he would un- 

 derstand the distinction between natural and positive justice. 

 Homer employs the term themistes (i) to denote celestial 

 decrees directly communicated to mundane tribunals for their 



(1) In the Odyssey, xvi, 403, for example. 



