Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  ) 
November,  1920.  | 
Law-Making. 
823 
making  is  that  reform  measures  invariably  impose  burdens  upon 
perfectly  innocent  people  who.  do  not  stand  in  need  of  reformation 
and  invariably  place  restrictions  upon  acts  that  may  be  wholly 
without  evil  or  even  meritorious. 
This  has  been  true  of  every  piece  of  reform  legislation  that  has 
ever  been  placed  upon  the  statute  books.  The  best  of  reform  mea- 
sures are  mixtures  of  good  and  evil,  and  not  a  few  alleged  reform 
measures  have  been  responsible  for  the  growth  of  greater  evils  than 
those  they  were  intended  to  cure. 
Common  sense  therefore  demands  that  we  take  into  considera- 
tion the  burdens  a  proposed  law  will  certainly  impose  upon  inno- 
cent people  and  upon  innocent  industries  as  well  as  the  good  re- 
sults which  it  is  hoped  the  law  will  produce.  Like  other  things,  a 
reform,  law  may  some  times  cost  more  than  it  is  worth. 
The  exact  point  at  which  the  evils  of  a  reformatory  law  begin  to 
outweigh  the  good  cannot  be  determined  with  certainty  in  advance 
of  actual  trial,  but  experience  teaches  that  it  usually  falls  short  of 
the  extreme  limit  which  the  radical  reformer  is  inclined  to  demand. 
EXCESSIVE  REGULATION  PRECEDES  THE  DESTRUCTION  OF  LIBERTY. 
Another  fact  constantly  brought  to  the  attention  of  the  student 
of  political  history  is  that  peoples  who  have  obtained  their  liber- 
ties by  the  most  heroic  of  saxrifices  have  so  frequently  thrown  them 
away  again  in  the  friv^olous  pursuit  of  things  they  thought  would 
make  their  liberties  still  more  secure  and  their  freedom  still  more 
free. 
The  story  of  the  democracies  that  have  failed  shows  that  their 
vigor  and  prosperity  regularly  declined  with  the  growth  of  internal 
legislation,  or  with  the  forcing  of  obnoxious  regulations  upon  their 
citizens  by  the  factions  which  successively  obtained  control,  until 
they  had  so  weakened  themselves  by  internal  strife  that  they  fell 
to  pieces  of  their  own  weight  or  were  an  easy  prey  to  enemies  from 
without. 
Of  course,  no  people  ever  intentionally  destroyed  their  own  liber- 
ties. They  always  intended  their  law  making  to  make  their  coun- 
tries better  and  stronger.  Their  uniform  mistake  was  in  consenting 
to  the  violation  of  fundamental  principles  for  the  sake  of  some  fancied 
immediate  good  which  their  radical  legislation  was  expected  to  ac- 
complish. 
The  one  great  lesson  of  all  these  unsuccessful  attempts  at  self- 
