and the antagonistic judicial theory of a fundamental law which binds even the sovereign. Three hundred years ago the progressives wanted to give Charles I absolute power that he might use it benevolently for the general good and they were enraged to see him tied down by antiquated legal bonds discovered by lawyers in such musty and dusty documents as Magna Carta. While Pound inclines to the judicial side of the contest and believes that the supremacy of law is a principle of permanent value, he condemns many judges for construing the provisions of Bills of Rights as eternal crystallizations of eighteenth century conceptions. His view is that the courts should not always set themselves against the popular will in the interest of an abstract individual, but should stand for the ultimate and more important social ideals of the age as against the more immediately pressing, but less weighty interests of the moment, by which will, unrestrained by reason, may be swayed.
After a fascinating chapter on the influence of the pioneers and a discussion of the final factor of the past, the nineteenth century philosophy of law, the book concludes with an examination of present tendencies which are remaking the law for the future. The nature of these tendencies may best be stated by Dean Pound himself:
"Let us put the new point of view in terms of engineering; let us speak of a change from a political or ethical idealistic interpretation to an engineering interpretation. Let us think of the problem of the end of law in terms of a great task or great series of tasks of social engineering. Let us say that the change consists in thinking not of an abstract harmonizing of human wills but of a concrete securing or realizing of human interests. From an earthly standpoint the central tragedy of existence is that there are not enough of the material goods of existence, as it were, to go round; that while individual claims and wants and desires are infinite; that while, in common phrase, we all want the earth, there are many of us but there is only one earth. Thus we may think of the task of the legal order as one of precluding friction and eliminating waste; as one of conserving the goods of existence in order to make them go as far as possible, and of precluding friction and eliminating waste in the human use and enjoyment of them, so that where each may not have all that he claims, he may at least have all that is possible."
