THE CIVIL AND THE COMMON LAW dividual relations, which have been known to courts and lawyers for many centuries. If it be said by combinations of numbers and of wealth, power has been centralized in a few hands, creating a congestion which the ordinary administration of quinine is not effectual to reach, the answer must be that the concentration of power has its own natural limitations; that, after all, combina tions are but aggregations of individuals, each of whom has the same self-conscious desire for his own welfare which nature im planted in him before he entered into a com bination; that each combination depends after all upon the individual capacity and skill and exertion of those who compose it, on those into whose control it falls; and that, to change the illustration, the larger and deeper the sea, the less significant, as compared to the quiet under-currents which control the movements of its waters and tend to restore them to equilibrium, is the wave which is raised by the sudden unex pected hurricane. Let us still look after the rights of the individual. Let us still give to him the largest practical liberty for the ex ercise of his particular powers and functions, and the law of gravity will speedily restore to the natural condition those extraordinary manifestations which seem to us so alarm ing; not so much by reason of the damage which they actually do, as by reason of the terror and apprehension which they arouse through the creation of the imaginary danger that a multiplication of them may disinte grate the world. Human ills become un bearable in the imagination rather than by reason of any actual realization of their consequences. Combinations are not new in human history, nor are they necessarily harmful. Neither is the accumulation of large wealth in the hands of a few a thing unheard of in past times. The capacity to associate and to effect the ends which the human being naturally desires to bring about by coordinating his forces with those of others, is an inherent element in the consti tution of man. The limitations on the
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power of association are also inherent in the constitution of man. The desire for law, order, .and safety is inherent, and the dangers which we imagine, will become real only as we fail for the time being to make use of the corrective tendencies. Sanity, judgment, courageous assertion of individ ual rights, these are the protective remedies within our power. The continued develop ment of strong individualism to keep pace with the natural development of the capac ity to associate, will maintain the stability of the social fabric. Each individual re mains subject to the law of his own creation and constitution. Government and religion, and sociology, must not forget the individ ual as the ultimate atom, and the natural forces inherent in that atom are the forces which determine the form and constitution of the whole human structure. Going back to the comparison between the fundamental conceptions of the civil and of the common law, it is worthy of con sideration that the entire conception of the nature of the courts and their proper func tions under the two systems is radically different. The earliest courts in England were local and popular courts, and it was necessarily so, for there was no sovereign and supreme authority from which the power of a judge could proceed, or by which the judgments rendered under such authority could be enforced. Indeed, the laws to be observed and administered by the courts were of popular origin, and represented largely local usages and customs. When the kingship came eventually to be an es tablished institution among the AngloSaxons, the king was regarded rather as the executive head of the state to enforce the law than as the source of the authority on which the law rested. King Alfred is said to have promulgated a collection of laws, but this promulgation seems to have been rather a publication of those rules estab lished by usage, and also to some extent by legislation, which were already in existence, than a pronouncement of new laws.
