"We are assured, on what appeared unexceptionable testimony, that a terrible constitutional disease was undermining the health and vigor of the nation, and especially destroying innocent women and children."
And then note the startling circumstance that while so erroneous a conception of the facts may be spread abroad, there may, by the consequent alarm, be produced a blindness to facts of the most unquestionable kind, established by the ever-accumulating experiences of successive generations. Until quite recently, our forms of judicial procedure embodied the principle that some overt injury must be committed before legal instrumentalities can be brought into play; and conformity to this principle was in past times gradually brought about by efforts to avoid the terrific evils that otherwise arose. As a Professor of Jurisprudence reminds us, "the object of the whole complicated system of checks and guards provided by English law, and secured by a long train of constitutional conflicts, has been to prevent an innocent man being even momentarily treated as a thief, a murderer, or other criminal, on the mere alleged or real suspicion of a policeman." Yet now, in the state of groundless fright that has been got up, "the concern hitherto exhibited by the Legislature for the personal liberty of the meanest citizen has been needlessly and recklessly lost sight of."[1] It is an a priori inference from human nature that irresponsible power is sure, on the average of cases, to be grossly abused. The histories of all nations, through all times, teem with proofs that irresponsible power has been grossly abused. The growth of representative governments is the growth of arrangements made to prevent the gross abuse of irresponsible power. Each of our political struggles, ending in a further development of free institutions, has been made to put an encl to some particular gross abuse of irresponsible power. Yet the facts thrust upon us by our daily experiences of men, verifying the experiences of the whole human race throughout the past, are now tacitly denied and it is tacitly asserted that irresponsible power will not be grossly abused. And all because of a manufactured panic about a decreasing disease, which kills not one-fifteenth of the number killed by scarlet fever, and which takes ten years to destroy as many as diarrhæ destroys in one year.
See, then, what we have to guard against in collecting sociological data—even data concerning the present, and, still more, data concerning the past. For testimonies that come down to us respecting bygone social states, political, religious, judicial, physical, moral, etc., and respecting the actions of particular causes on those social states, have been liable to perversions not simply as great, but greater; since, while the regard for truth was less, there was more readiness to accept unproved statements.
- ↑ Prof. Sheldon Amos. See also his late important work, "A Systematic View of the Science of Jurisprudence," pp. 119, 303, 512, 514.
