ities, I think the practical man is wrong. There are six million inhabitants in this state. There is a huge volume of legislation. But I suppose it would be a gross exaggeration to assume that one hundredth part of one per cent. of the population is acquainted with a single page of this volume. The laws of the state are a kind of bony excrescence outside the real life of the people. We never hear of a reduction in the tariff or an increase in the school tax but we find by experience the truth in the lines of an eighteenth century poet:
The part that kings or laws can cause or cure.
Such life and coercive power as there are in the laws flow into them from the organism which exists inside the political government, inside the bony excresence of the laws. Society—spontaneously organized by self-enforcing needs and economic pressures and common standards and desires—society generates the power, develops the emotions and virtues which sustain the laws. And society expresses and executes its will, say in ninety-nine per cent. of its activities, without formally designated legislators, judges or executives; so that a right-minded member of society has occasion, only two or
