drawn from it; as, for example, from the 134 public acts passed in 1856-'57, of which all but 68 are wholly or partially repealed. And thus it happens that, as every autumn shows us, even the strongest men, finding their lives during the recess overtaxed with the needful study, are obliged so to locate themselves that by an occasional day's hard riding after the hounds, or a long walk over the moors with gun in hand, they may be enabled to bear the excessive strain on their nervous systems. Of course, therefore, I am not so unreasonable as to deny that judgments, even empirical, which are guided by such carefully-amassed experiences, must be of much worth.
But, fully recognizing the vast amount of information which the legislator has laboriously gathered from the accounts of institutions and laws, past and present, here and elsewhere, and admitting that, before thus instructing himself, he would no more think of enforcing a new law than would a medical student think of plunging an operating-knife into the human body before learning where the arteries ran, the remarkable anomaly here demanding our attention is, that he objects to any thing like analysis of these phenomena he has so diligently collected, and has no faith in conclusions drawn from the ensemble of them. Not discriminating very correctly between the word "general" and the word "abstract," and regarding as abstract principles what are in nearly all cases general principles, he speaks contemptuously of these as belonging to the region of theory, and as not concerning the law-maker. Any wide truth that is insisted upon as being implied in many narrow truths, seems to him remote from reality and unimportant for guidance. The results of recent experiments in legislation he thinks worth attending to; and, if any one reminds him of the experiments he has read so much about, that were made in other times and other places, he regards these also, separately taken, as deserving of consideration. But, if, instead of studying special classes of legislative experiments, some one compares many classes together, generalizes the results, and proposes to be guided by the generalization, he shakes his head skeptically. And his skepticism passes into ridicule if it is proposed to affiliate such generalized results on the laws of Mind. To prescribe for society on the strength of countless unclassified observations, appears to him a sensible course; but, to colligate and systematize the observations so as to educe tendencies of human behavior displayed throughout cases of numerous kinds, to trace these tendencies to their sources in the mental natures of men, and thence to draw conclusions for guidance, appears to him a visionary course.
Let us look at some of the fundamental facts he ignores, and at the results of ignoring them.
Rational legislation, based as it can only be on a true theory of conduct, which is derivable only from a true theory of mind, must
