Am.  Jour.  Pharm. ) 
November,  1920. ) 
Law-Making. 
825 
The  doctrinaires  are  now  ready  to  tear  these  old  and  well  tried 
charters  of  liberty  to  pieces  and  to  confer  upon  the  legislative  and 
executive  departments  the  very  powers  which  the  elder  group  of 
statesmen  were  certain  should  be  withheld  from  them.  Perhaps 
the  doctrinaires  are  right;  but  if  our  government  can  possess  un- 
limited powers  without  using  them  oppressively,  it  will  be  the  first 
instance  of  its  kind  in  all  the  history  of  civilization. 
NO  LAW  CAN  BK  TOO  PKR  CENT.  EFFlCENT. 
Another  lesson  of  political  history  is  that  even  the  best  of  law  s 
will  fall  far  short  of  complete  efficiency  in  removing  the  evils  at 
which  it  is  aimed.  Whether  we  have  one  law  or  a  thousand  upon 
a  given  subject,  there  will  always  be  a  residium  of  evil  that  mere 
law  making  will  not  cure.  When  this  irreducible  minimum  has 
been  reached  the  multiplying  of  prohibitions  only  multiplies  the 
number  of  violations. 
It  is  an  accepted  principle  in  mechanics  that  no  machine  can  be 
expected  to  reach  loo  per  cent,  in  practical  efficiency,  and  the  mech- 
anician therefore  directs  his  efforts  to  obtaining  the  most  profitable 
ratio  of  power  expended  to  work  delivered.  Strangely  enough, 
people  who  do  not  expect  to  obtain  one  hundred  per  cent,  efficiency 
from  any  construction  of  wood  or  metal,  are  forever  trying  to  com- 
pose laws  that  shall  be  one  hundred  per  cent,  efficient,  that  is  to  say, 
laws  that  cannot  be  or  that  will  not  be  violated. 
Some  thousands  of  years  ago  there  was  promulgated  a  code  of 
ten  commandments  governing  the  fundamentals  of  social  and  moral 
conduct,  and  in  all  the  centuries  since  then  the  divine  author  of  that 
code  has  neither  repealed  nor  amended  a  single  one  of  the  ten  original 
articles.  A  divine  intelligence  could  be  expected  to  understand  that 
if  men  are  disposed  to  disobey  the  commandments  of  a  primary 
code  they  will  be  equally  disposed  to  disobey  the  provisions  of  all 
subsidiary  codes  of  amendments  and  regulations,  but  human  law 
makers,  when  they  discover  that  one  set  of  statutes  is  being  vio- 
lated, seem  to  imagine  that  by  the  adoption  of  a  new  code  of  regula- 
tions, or  by  rearranging  the  phraseology  of  the  old  code,  the  law 
violator  will  become  a  law  observer. 
The  law  making  bodies  of  this  year  are  busy  amending  and  re- 
forming the  laws  adopted  at  previous  sessions.  Last  year  they 
were  doing  the  same  thing.  Next  year  they  will  be  repeating  the 
process. 
