Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  ) 
November,  1920.  ) 
Law-Making. 
821 
No  matter  what  evil  is  under  consideration,  the  first  remedy  thought 
of  or  proposed  is  legislation.  The  new  bills  introduced  during  the 
life  of  a  single  congress  may  run  into  the  tens  of  thousands,  and 
even  a  state  general  assembly  may  be  called  upon  to  consider  more 
than  a  thousand  proposed  new  laws  during  a  single  session. 
Granting  that  our  highly  organized  civilization,  with  predomi- 
nating industrial  and  commercial  interests,  may  require  a  more 
complex  system  of  jurisprudence  than  would  serve  the  necessities 
of  a  less  specialized  social  organization,  it  is  entirely  absurd  to  as- 
sume that  society  needs  the  amount  of  regulation  that  these  frantic 
attempts  at  law  making  would  indicate.  Comparatively  few  of  the 
proposed  new  laws  possess  any  real  merit.  A  large  proportion 
simply  reflect  the  spirit  of  meddlesomeness  that  governs  the  minds 
of  those  who  gratuitously  assume  both  their  right  and  their  ability 
to  prescribe  the  standards  according  to  which  their  fellow  citizens 
shall  order  their  morals,  their  occupations  and  their  daily  lives. 
Assuming  that  we  shall  continue  to  grind  out  national  and  state 
legislation  at  the  present  rate,  what  will  be  the  volume  of  written 
law  in  another  twenty-five  years? 
Consider  also  the  bulk  of  secondary  legislation  in  the  form  of 
rules  and  regulations  adopted  by  the  administrative  officers  of  the 
law.  Congress  adopts  a  measure  covering  four  or  five  pages,  where- 
upon the  department  of  administration  issues  a  code  of  regulations 
covering  fifty  or  sixty  pages,  introducing  obligations  and  producing 
results  which  the  original  law  making  body  could  not  have  contem- 
plated. 
This  country  began  its  existence  with  the  freest  government  on 
the  face  of  the  earth,  and  under  the  freest  of  governments  our  peo- 
ple have  prospered  as  no  people  ever  prospered  before.  Unless  the 
present  craze  for  law  making  can  be  checked,  the  next  generation 
will  find  itself  subject  to  more  regulation  than  was  old  verboten- 
ridden  Germany,  and  under  the  rule  of  more  bureaus  and  bureaucrats 
than  Russia  under  the  czars. 
THE   INABILITY   OF  REFORMERS  TO   LEARN   FROM  EXPERIENCE. 
vSomehow  men  do  not  seem  to  learn,  or  at  least  do  not  heed,  the 
lessons  of  experience  in  politics  as  they  do  the  lessons  of  physical 
science. 
In  the  physical  sciences  facts  ascertained  by  careful  experimenta- 
tion are  recorded  in  literature  and  become  a  part  of  the  general  in- 
