"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

PROVERBS xxix. 18.

One of the most quoted—and also mis-quoted—proverbs of the wise Solomon says, as translated in the authorized version: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." What Solomon actually said was: "Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint." The translator thus confused an effect with a cause. What was the vision to which the Wise Man referred? The rest of the proverb, which is rarely quoted, explains:

"Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

The vision, then, is the authority of law, and Solomon's warning is that to which the great and noble founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, many centuries later gave utterance, when he said:

"That government is free to the people under it, where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and all the rest is tyranny, oligarchy and confusion."

It is my present purpose to discuss the moral psychology of the present revolt against the spirit of authority. Too little consideration has been paid by the legal profession to questions of moral psychology. These have been left to metaphysicians and ecclesiastics, and yet—to paraphrase the saying of the Master—"the laws were made for man and not man for the laws," and if the science of the law ignores the study of human nature and attempts to conform man to the laws, rather than the laws to man, then its development is a very partial and imperfect one.

Let me first be sure of my premises. Is there in this day and generation a spirit of lawlessness greater or different than that that has always characterized human society? Such spirit of revolt against authority has always existed, even when the penalty of death was visited upon nearly all offences against life and property. Blackstone tells us (Book IV, Chap. I) that in the eighteenth century it was a capital offence to cut down a cherry tree in an orchard—a drastic penalty which should increase our admiration for George Washington's courage and veracity.

We are apt to see the past in a golden haze, which obscures our vision. Thus, we think of William Penn's "holy experiment" on the banks of the Delaware as the realization of Sir Thomas More's dream of Utopia; and yet Pennsylvania was somewhat intemperately called in 1698 "the greatest refuge for pirates and rogues in America," and Penn himself wrote, about that time, that he had heard of no place which was "more overrun with wickedness" than his City of Brotherly Love, where things were so "openly committed in defiance of law and virtue—facts so foul that I am forbid by common modesty to relate them."

Conceding that lawlessness is not a novel phenomenon, is not the present time characterized by an exceptional revolt against the authority of law? The statistics of our criminal courts show in recent years an unprecedented growth in crimes. Thus, in the federal courts, pending criminal indictments have increased from 9503 in the year 1912 to over 70,000 in the year 1921. While this abnormal increase is, in part, due to sumptuary legislation—for approximately 30,000 cases now pending arise under the prohibition statutes—yet, eliminating these, there yet remains an increase in nine years of over 400 per cent, in the comparatively narrow sphere of the federal criminal jurisdiction. I have been unable to get the data from the State Courts; but the growth of crimes can be measured by a few illustrative statistics. Thus, the losses from burglaries which have been repaid by casualty companies have grown in amount from $886,000 in 1914 to over $10,000,000 in 1920; and, in a like period, embezzlements have increased five-fold. It is notorious that the thefts from the mails and express companies and other carriers have grown to enormous proportions. The hold-up of railroad trains is now of frequent occurrence, and is not confined to the unsettled sections of the country. Not only in the United States, but even in Europe, such crimes of violence are of increasing frequency, and a recent dispatch from Berne, under date of August 7, 1921, stated that the famous International Expresses of Europe were now run under a military guard.

The streets of our cities, once reasonably secure from crimes of violence, have now become the field of operations for the foot-pad and highwayman. The days of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard have returned, with this serious difference—that the Turpins and Sheppards of our day are not dependent upon the horse, but have the powerful automobile to facilitate their crimes and make sure their escape.

Thus in Chicago alone, 5000 automobiles were stolen in a single year. Once murder was an infrequent and abnormal crime. To-day in our large cities it is of almost daily occurrence. In New York, in 1917, there were 236 murders and only 67 convictions; in 1918, 221, and 77 convictions. In Chicago, in 1919, there were 336, and 44 convictions.

When the crime wave was at its height a year ago, the police authorities in more than one American city confessed their impotence to impose effective restraints. Life and property had seemingly become almost as insecure as during the Middle Ages.[3]

[Footnote 3: The reader will bear in mind that these words were spoken in August 1921. Unquestionably, the situation has greatly improved during the present year(1922).]

As to the subtler and more insidious crimes against the political state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city, state and nation. Losses by such misapplication of public funds—piled Pelion on Ossa—no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of millions. Our city governments are, in many instances, foul cancers on the body politic; and for us to boast of having solved the problem of local self-government is as fatuous as for a strong man to exult in his health when his body is covered with running sores. It has been estimated that the annual profits from violations of the prohibition laws have reached $300,000,000. Men who thus violate these laws for sordid gain are not likely to obey other laws, and the respect for law among all classes steadily diminishes as our people become familiar with, and tolerant to, wholesale criminality. Whether the moral and economic results of Prohibition overbalance this rising wave of crime, time will tell.

In limine, let us note the significant fact that this spirit of revolt against authority is not confined to the political state, and therefore its causes lie beyond that sphere of human action.

Human life is governed by all manner of man-made laws—laws of art, of social intercourse, of literature, music, business—all evolved by custom and imposed by the collective will of society. Here we find the same revolt against tradition and authority.

In music, its fundamental canons have been thrown aside and discord has been substituted for harmony as its ideal. Its culmination—jazz—is a musical crime. If the forms of dancing and music are symptomatic of an age, what shall be said of the universal craze to indulge in crude and clumsy dancing to the vile discords of so-called "jazz" music? The cry of the time is:

"On with the dance, let joy be" unrefined.

In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and other aesthetic Bolsheviki.

In poetry, where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal. Hundreds of poets are feebly echoing the "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, without the redeeming merit of his occasional sublimity of thought.

In commerce, the revolt is against the purity of standards and the integrity of business morals. Who can question that this is pre-eminently the age of the sham and the counterfeit? Science is prostituted to deceive the public by cloaking the increasing deterioration in quality of merchandise. The blatant medium of advertising has become so mendacious as to defeat its own purpose.

In the recent deflation in commodity values, there was widespread "welching" among business men who had theretofore been classed as reputable. Of course, I recognize that a far greater number kept their contracts, even when it brought them to the verge of ruin. But when in the history of American business was there such a volume of broken faith as in the drastic deflation of 1920?

In the greater sphere of social life, we find the same revolt against the institutions which have the sanction of the past. Social laws, which mark the decent restraints of print, speech and dress, have in recent decades been increasingly disregarded. The very foundations of the great and primitive institutions of mankind—like the family, the Church, and the State—have been shaken. Nature itself is defied. Thus, the fundamental difference of sex is disregarded by social and political movements which ignore the permanent differentiation of social function ordained by Nature.

All these are but illustrations of the general revolt against the authority of the past—a revolt that can be measured by the change in the fundamental presumption of men with respect to the value of human experience. In all former ages, all that was in the past was presumptively true, and the burden was upon him who sought to change it. To-day, the human mind apparently regards the lessons of the past as presumptively false—and the burden is upon him who seeks to invoke them.

Lest I be accused of undue pessimism, let me cite as a witness one who, of all men, is probably best equipped to express an opinion upon the moral state of the world. I refer to the venerable head of that religious organization[4] which, with its trained representatives in every part of the world, is probably better informed as to its spiritual state than any other organization.

[Footnote 4: Reference is to the late Pope Benedict.]

Speaking last Christmas Eve, in an address to the College of Cardinals, the venerable Pontiff gave expression to an estimate of present conditions which should have attracted far greater attention than it apparently did.

The Pope said that five plagues were now afflicting humanity.

The first was the unprecedented challenge to authority.

The second, an equally unprecedented hatred between man and man.

The third was the abnormal aversion to work.

The fourth, the excessive thirst for pleasure as the great aim of life.

The fifth, a gross materialism which denied the reality of the spiritual in human life.

The accuracy of this indictment will commend itself to men who like myself are not of Pope Benedict's communion.

I trust that I have already shown that the challenge to authority is universal and is not confined to that of the political state. Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering. Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt. If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among the most enlightened peoples, the underground rumblings of revolution may be heard.

The Government of Italy has been preserved from overthrow, not alone by its constituted authorities, but by a band of resolute men, called the "fascisti," who have taken the law into their own hands, as did the vigilance committees in western mining camps, to put down worse disorders.

Even England, the mother of democracies, and the most stable of all Governments in the maintenance of law, has been shaken to its very foundations in the last three years, when powerful groups of men attempted to seize the State by the throat and compel submission to their demands by threatening to starve the community. This would be serious enough if it were only the world-old struggle between capital and labour and had only involved the conditions of manual toil. But the insurrection against the political state in England was more political than it was economic. It marked, on the part of millions of men, a portentous decay of belief in representative government and its chosen organ—the ballot box. Great and powerful groups had suddenly discovered—and it may be the most portentous political discovery of the twentieth century—that the power involved in their control over the necessaries of life, as compared with the power of the voting franchise, was as a forty-two centimetre cannon to the bow and arrow. The end sought to be attained, namely the nationalization of the basic industries, and even the control of the foreign policy of Great Britain, vindicated the truth of the British Prime Minister's statement that these great strikes involved something more than a mere struggle over the conditions of labour, and that they were essentially seditious attempts against the life of the State.[5]

[Footnote 5: I am here speaking of the conditions of 1920. I appreciate the great improvement, which seems to me to justify the Lincoln-like patience of Lloyd George.]

Nor were they altogether unsuccessful; for, when the armies of Lenin and Trotsky were at the gates of Warsaw, in the summer of 1920, the attempts of the Governments of England and Belgium to afford assistance to the embattled Poles were paralysed by the labour groups of both countries, who threatened a general strike if those two nations joined with France in aiding Poland to resist a possibly greater menace to Western civilization than has occurred since Attila and his Huns stood on the banks of the Marne.

Of greater significance to the welfare of civilization is the complete subversion during the world war of nearly all the international laws which had been slowly built up in a thousand years. These principles, as codified by the two Hague Conventions, were immediately swept aside in the fierce struggle for existence, and civilized man, with his liquid fire and poison gas and his deliberate; attacks upon undefended cities and their women and children, waged war with the unrelenting ferocity of primitive times.

Surely, this fierce war of extermination, which caused the loss of three hundred billion dollars in property and thirty millions of human lives, did mark for the time being the "twilight of civilization." The hands on the dial of time had been put back—temporarily, let us hope and pray—a thousand years.

Nor will many question the accuracy of the second count in Pope Benedict's indictment. The war to end war only ended in unprecedented hatred between nation and nation, class and class, and man and man. Victors and vanquished are involved in a common ruin. And if in this deluge of blood, which has submerged the world, there is a Mount Ararat, upon which the ark of a truer and better peace can find refuge, it has not yet appeared above the troubled surface of the waters.

Still less can one question the closely related third and fourth counts in Pope Benedict's indictment, namely the unprecedented aversion to work, when work is most needed to reconstruct the foundations of prosperity, or the excessive thirst for pleasure which preceded, accompanied, and now has followed the most terrible tragedy in the annals of mankind. The true spirit of work seems to have vanished from millions of men; that spirit of which Shakespeare made his Orlando speak when he said of his true servant, Adam:

  "O good old man! how well in thee appears
  The constant service of the antique world.
  When service sweat for duty, not for meed!"

The moral of our industrial civilization has been shattered. Work for work's sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit. The conception of work as a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes and in all countries.

The spirit of work is of more than sentimental importance. It may be said of it, as Hamlet says of death: "The readiness is all." All of us are conscious of the fact that, given a love of work, and the capacity for it seems almost illimitable—as witness Napoleon, with his thousand-man power, or Shakespeare, who in twenty years could write more than twenty masterpieces.

On the other hand, given an aversion to work, and the less a man does the less he wants to do, or is seemingly capable of doing.

The great evil of the world to-day is this aversion to work. As the mechanical era diminished the element of physical exertion in work, we would have supposed that man would have sought expression for his physical faculties in other ways. On the contrary, the whole history of the mechanical era is a persistent struggle for more pay and less work, and to-day it has culminated in world-wide ruin; for there is not a nation in civilization which is not now in the throes of economic distress, and many of them are on the verge of ruin. In my judgment, the economic catastrophe of 1921 is far greater than the politico-military catastrophe of 1914.

The results of these two tendencies, measured in the statistics of productive industry, are literally appalling.

Thus, in 1920, Italy, according to statistics of her Minister of Labour, lost 55,000,000 days of work because of strikes alone. From July to September, many great factories were in the hands of revolutionary communists. A full third of these strikes had for their end political and not economic purposes.

In Germany, the progressive revolt of labour against work is thus measured by competent authority: There were lost in strikes in 1917, 900,000 working days; in 1918, 4,900,000, and, in 1919, 46,600,000.

Even in our own favoured land, the same phenomena are observable. In the State of New York alone for 1920, there was a loss due to strikes of over 10,000,000 working days.

In all countries the losses by such cessations from labour are little as compared with those due to the spirit which in England is called "ca'-canny" or the shirking of performance of work, and of sabotage, which means the deliberate destruction of machinery in operation. Everywhere the phenomenon has been observed that, with the highest wages known in the history of modern times, there has been an unmistakable lessening of efficiency, and that with an increase in the number of workers, there has been a decrease in output. Thus, the transportation companies in the United States have seriously made a claim against the United States Government for damages to their roads, amounting to $750,000,000, claimed to be due to the inefficiency of labour during the period of governmental operation.

Accompanying this indisposition to work efficiently has been a mad desire for pleasure, such as, if it existed in like measure in preceding ages, has not been seen within the memory of living man. Man has danced upon the verge of a social abyss, and, as previously suggested, the dancing has, both in form and in accompanying music, lost its former grace and reverted to the primitive forms of crude vulgarity.

which gives the spectators the maximum of emotional expression with the minimum of mental effort, had not been eclipsed by the splendour of a Dempsey or a Carpentier.

Of the last count in Pope Benedict's indictment, I shall say but little. It is more appropriate for the members of that great and noble profession which is more intimately concerned with the spiritual advance of mankind. It is enough to say that, while the Church as an institution continues to exist, the belief in the supernatural and even in the spiritual has been supplanted in the souls of millions of men by a gross and debasing materialism.

If my reader agrees with me in my premises then we are not likely to disagree in the conclusion that the causes of these grave symptoms are not ephemeral or superficial; but must have their origin in some deep-seated and world-wide change in human society. If there is to be a remedy, we must first diagnose this malady of the human soul.

For example, let us not "lay the flattering unction to our souls" that this spirit is solely the reaction of the great war.

The present weariness and lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the war. Indeed, it is possible that the world war, far from causing the malaise of the age, was, in itself, but one of its many symptoms.

Undoubtedly, there are many contributing causes which have swollen the turbid tide of this world-wide revolution against the spirit of authority.

Thus, the multiplicity of laws does not tend to develop a law-abiding spirit. This fact has often been noted. Thus Napoleon, on the eve of the 18th Brumaire, complained that France, with a thousand folios of law, was a lawless nation. Unquestionably, the political state suffers in authority by the abuse of legislation, and especially by the appeal to law to curb evils that are best left to individual conscience.

In this age of democracy, the average individual is too apt to recognize two constitutions—one, the constitution of the State, and the second, an unwritten constitution, to him of higher authority, under which he believes that no law is obligatory which he regards as in excess of the true powers of government. Of this latter spirit, the widespread violation of the prohibition law is a familiar illustration.

A race of individualists obey reluctantly, when they obey at all, any laws which they regard as unreasonable or vexatious. Indeed, they are increasingly opposed to any law, which affects their selfish interests. Thus many good women are involuntary smugglers. They deny the authority of the state to impose a tax upon a Paquin gown. The law's delays and laxity in administration breed a spirit of contempt, and too often invite men to take the law into their own hands. These causes are so familiar that their statement is a commonplace.

Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with the advance of democratic institutions. Undoubtedly, the excessive emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has contributed to this malady of the age. Men talked, and still talk, loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties. And yet if we were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause.

To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the change must, therefore, be of environment.

I know of but one such change that is sufficiently widespread and deep-seated to account adequately for this malady of our time.

Beginning with the close of the eighteenth century, and continuing throughout the nineteenth, a prodigious transformation has taken place in the environment of man, which has done more to revolutionize the conditions of human life than all the changes that had taken place in the 500,000 preceding years which science has attributed to man's life on the planet. Up to the period of Watt's discovery of steam vapour as a motive power,............