484
THE GREEN BAG
While such legislative evil is incurable, and self-reliant, energetic, progressive people like a disease is inherited from age to age, they were, had there been a privy-coun happily the law-maker sometimes reforms. sellor or a police captain standing at every Time and experience may broaden him, mud puddle in America to keep people and after much expense to his country he from stepping into it," and that "in a may rise to a height from which he deplores democracy with little government things the folly of those upon whom his mantle might go badly in detail but well on the has fallen. If we could educate legislators, whole, while in a monarchy with much and and keep them in office at least until the omnipresent government things might go country could profit from their training very pleasingly in detail, but poorly on the and experience, or have them bequeath whole." This was forty years ago. From their heads to their successors, as Mirabeau the least governed people in the world we lamented he could not do, in many instances are rapidly becoming the most governed we would not grudge the cost of the tuition. people in the world. Our increasing com But, like the weeds that with each recurrent missions for almost every department of year come up in the spring, a new crop of public affairs are making our government, embryo statesmen, with no inherited state and national, the most comprehensive experience, is always terrifying the country. system of bureaucracy ever known. The complex conditions of our times in each This is a part of the price for our institu tions. We must take the evil with the of their diversified forms are given special good. If we cannot get the good at a less treatment and administration. This is a price then it is not too much to pay. If prolific source of legislation, much of it in we could erect effective safeguards against flagrant disregard of the best sanctioned such legislation this would no longer be a and most venerated doctrines. government "of the people, by the people, The administration of justice should be for the people," but a government of the by the courts alone. It is subversive of aristocracy. As these conditions will not every idea of Anglican civil liberty for the in our time materially change, we may as judge to commit himself in any way to an well view the situation with patience and opinion until the cause shall have been in a philosophic vein, with no great hope presented according to law. This is the of stopping the annual flow of unnecessary distinguishing feature between the accusa and unwise legislation. Like the brook, it torial and the inquisitorial trial, in which will go on forever, or at least as long as our the judge inquires, becomes the prosecutor, present form of government survives. The and at the same time is theoretically the best that we can hope to accomplish is to protector of the arraigned, "thus uniting bring about, as we have been doing with a triad of functions within himself which marked success, the enactment of uniform amounts to a psychological incongruity." legislation in the several states. Our work It is demanding an impossibility of will in the main be constructive. We can human nature, to expect one to try, with accomplish practically nothing in the way the proper judicial temperament, a cause first brought to his attention by an ex of restraint. Much of our modern legislation is the parte complaint, to which he has so far outcome of a departure from principles inclined his mind upon a preliminary show which we have always regarded as funda ing as to institute an investigation, and upon which after such investigation, upon mental. proceedings initiated by his sanction, he Carl Schurz, in an interview with Bis marck in 1868, said that "the American sits in judgment. One might as well expect people would hardly have become the the hunter who, with toil and skill has
