Lois

“ And it will be long before social discipline has so far modified human character that reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order of things, will serve in place of reverence for the power which enforces law. ”

“ Let the weak and defenseless talk their fill of right, of justice, of equity; let these invoke reason, logic, common sense and fair play; but the world's rulers, the dominant class, know only one law, recognize but one rule—might. ”

“ Rule stands by rule, usage beside usage,—a mere aggregate or multitude of petty tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and each pressing with all the weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of ceremonial law is here of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle of political obligation. ”

“ Again, I find that there are rules of social life, which take the form of what are called "laws," and these are imposed by the will of some governing authority; they are always the product of some one human will, or of the collective will of a greater number of persons. ”

“ If we look into history we shall find, that laws, which are, or ought to be, conventions between men in a state of freedom, have been, for the most part the work of the passions of a few, or the consequences of a fortuitous or temporary necessity ”

“ How much our super-select society resembles the Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays, who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head of the nations! ”

“ Will law save an idiot or undo a Shelley or a Caesar? Will law pull down the sun and set the moon in its place? My masters, we can only sympathize at times where we cannot possibly act,—and we can act and aid where we cannot cure. ”

“ And who commands our life and regulates it? The nobles, the functionaries and all sorts of other people, not belonging to our class. From them come the laws, the newspapers, science—everything from them. ”

“ We hear, indeed, some wild talk about the establishment of a social order, or disorder, without government and without laws and courts of justice, in which everybody can do what he or she pleases, and that when everybody can do what he or she pleases, everybody will do right, and have enough of the good things of the world, and be happy. ”

“ Such is the glorious vision of the ‘Reign of Law.’ Let it be the business of every Englishman and Englishwoman to arrange the framework of our social and political system, that law may have an uninterrupted sway; then shall we be a united, prosperous, and [114] contented people, and the reign of lawless agitators, bribery-mongers, and counterfeit statesmen will have passed away into the oblivion and obscurity of a more suitable but less favoured region. ”

“ What confuses our view is the fact that these formal documentary statements of the kinds and degrees of obedience to which the people assent, the methods of power to which they submit, the sort of responsibility upon which they insist, have become, from the very necessity of their nature, a distinct and superior sort of precise and positive law. ”

“ Our notion of order in civil society being taken from the analogy of subjects inanimate and dead, is frequently false; we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature; we think that obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the hands of a few, are its real constituents. ”

“ Thus, hatched by Licentiousness, Faction would attain to its enormous Growth: The unprincipled among the Great would form the Head, the unprincipled among the Populace would form the Body, of this rapacious Monster. ”

“ If a class could be simply an organ for the discharge of certain functions, and each man in the whole body politic able to fit himself for that class, the injustice, and therefore the malignant variety of discontent, would disappear. Of course, I am speaking only of justice. I do not attempt to define the proper ends of society, or regard justice in itself as a sufficient guarantee for all desirable results. ”

“ I go into your great halls where laws are made—I see the wise men making laws to bind the weak and tempted with iron chains—laws to help bad men lead lives of impurity—laws to make legal crimes that your Holy Book says renders one forever unfit for Heaven. ”

“ So that virtue is divided into prudence, justice, manly gallantry, and temperance.
LVIII. Rule is divided into five parts. One is rule according to law; another is rule according to nature; a third kind is rule according to custom; a fourth division is rule with reference to family; the fifth is rule by force. Now when the rulers in cities are elected by the citizens, then they rule according to law; those who rule according to nature are the males, not only among men, but also among all other animals; for everywhere we shall find it as a general rule that the male rules the female ”

“ Law had represented only the will of the master, and the law courts only the instruments of his arbitrary authority, so that the lover of righteousness could only pursue it by cutting himself off from all the ties of society and living the life of the ascetic. ”

“ But, good or bad, as laws in this country are merely the expression of the people’s will, they should be respected as long as they remain laws. For law is just as necessary to the human race as is the air we breathe or the food we eat. ”

“ So far, however, from the excesses of the populace—at least, in the first years of the Revolution—being a surprise to us, it should more properly be a surprise that, as a rule, they evinced as much good-feeling and tolerance as they did! ”

“ The mind, and spirit, and wisdom, and intentions of the city are all situated in the laws. As our bodies cannot, if deprived of the mind, so the state, if deprived of law, cannot use its separate parts, which are to it as its sinews, its blood, and its limbs. The ministers of the law are the magistrates; the interpreters of the law are the judges; lastly, we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen. What is the reason, O Naso, why you sit in that place? 147What is the power by which those judges, invested with such dignity, are separated from you? ”

“ We can see the policeman on his beat, or the judge in court, or the members of the legislature—the men who, respectively, maintain, administer, and make the laws; and we can see the record of the laws in books. But the idea or principle of Law which has caused men to construct all this machinery for the making and enforcing of the laws, exists only in the mind. ”

“ At issue are the laws and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,—the State, commune, Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe or family. ”

“ But as each man's nature leads him to seek to satisfy his own passions or caprices without regard to others, law was established to bring him back to his duty. This law is the sum of the wills of the society, united to fix the conduct of its members, or to direct their actions towards the common aim of the association. For convenience, certain citizens are made executors of the popular will, and are called monarchs, magistrates, or representatives, according to the form of the government. ”

“ The duce of any other rule have I to govern myself by in this affair—and if I had one—as I do all things out of all rule—I would twist it and tear it to pieces, and throw it into the fire when I had done—Am I warm? I am, and the cause demands it—a pretty story! is a man to follow rules—or rules to follow him? ”

“ Among the universal propositions which are not derived from Induction, but which serve as ἀρχαὶ for Deduction and Demonstration, we may reckon the religious, ethical, æsthetical, social, political, &c., beliefs received in each different community, and impressed upon all newcomers born into it by the force of precept, example, authority. Here the major premiss is felt by each individual as carrying an authority of its own, stamped and enforced by the sanction of society, and by the disgrace or other penalties in store for those who disobey it. ”

“ If man’s soul had remained in a state of freedom and innocence, what merit would there have been in loving and obeying the order he found established, an order which it would not have been to his advantage to disturb? ”

“ She lays her hand upon thee, and thou falling into her ranks, goest to swell the legions of dependent things—the leader, it may be, but not the antagonist of nature. She bends thee down under the law of causality, and, standing in her muster-roll, thou art forced to acknowledge that law as the sovereign of thy soul. ”

“ But following the reign of law, the profound significance of which I will not now pause to dwell on, there is a third meaning attached to "civilise": it means to refine and enlighten; elevation in social and individual life. In the second and third meanings of this term, we have the guarantees of liberty, justice, equality, fraternity. ”

“ Hence we may conclude, that some power analogous to these, ought to exist in every numerous Society either of Men or Women, for the preservation of good Order, and that it is necessary that, in such Societies, a power of flagellation should be lodged somewhere. ”

“ If any man claims authority over the body, mind, and soul of one of his fellow-men, and claims this [Pg 154] authority not only for the whole life of his victim, but a like authority over all his descendants, there is no part of the civilized world where he will not be required to show some positive law, authorizing the power and the bondage. ”

“ Classical conventionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a hidden power, under the names of Law, or Legislator (or, by a mode of expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed weight and authority, but not named) , which moves, animates, enriches, and regenerates mankind. ”

“ When in the council which is held by the mortal instruments, as he denominates the passions, and the genius, as he terms the higher principle of reason or conscience, when in this council the mortal instruments prevail over the genius, the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection; in other words, the law of our constitution is violated, the man goes to neck, crime and misery ensue. ”

“ Love to God, and good will to man. All good and wholesome laws, virtue and truth above all things, and aristarchy, live forever! But woe to tyrants, mobs, aristocracy, anarchy, and toryism, and all those who invent or seek out unrighteous and vexatious law suits, under the pretext and color of law, or office, either religious or political. ”

“ There are some who look upon laws as an evil and a profanity, and who regard governing and being governed from natural love, hereditary, divinity or nobility, by faith and trust, as the genuine order of life, while the reign of law is held an order of corruption and injustice. ”

“ What are the true limits of State power in relation to appetites and propensities? Are sumptuary laws effectual? Does history, as the philosophy of example, justify such enactments? Can the law eradicate innate tendencies? Can character be transformed by statute? Is it possible to legislate morality into mankind? What should be the policy of statesmen and reformers in the realm of morals? If it is not possible to extirpate the passions by law, how may they be regulated, directed, educated and purified? ”

“ Ans.: "The state is a class instrument, and is the public power of coercion created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, a power which, being clothed with force, makes laws." ”

“ Suppose that these three classes, the feeble-minded, the timid, and the men overwhelmed and crushed by their condition, are as numerous as the humane portion of the masters, are one-tenth of the whole, or 300,000. The rest are conscious of the qualities of a man. They desire their freedom, and are kept in slavery only by external force—the systematic force of public law, the irregular force of private will. ”

“ To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he think the country poised, that an attack on them threatened the structure of justice. ”

“ Now, the circumstances of every associated group of human society, contending bravely for national honors and felicity of life, differ only from those thus supposed, in the greater, instead of less, necessity for the establishment of restraining law. ”

“ And although such institutions are the consequence, not the cause, of liberty, they do unquestionably react upon it, and from the force of habit they could for a while survive that from which they originally sprung. ”

“ In the minds of contemporaries, principles are identified with persons, who form, as it were, the focus on which the passions concentrate. At present we may consent to forget Wolsey, and fix our attention on the more permanently essential matter—the reform of the laws. ”

“ The FORCE of the people, or the popular will, in action and exerted, symbolized by the GAVEL, regulated and guided by and acting within the limits of LAW and ORDER, symbolized by the TWENTY-FOUR-INCH RULE, has for its fruit LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY,—liberty regulated by law ”

“ The Law, which represented not the ancient laws of the country, but Utopias, the factitious laws and pious frauds of the time of the pietistic kings, had become, since the nation had ceased to govern itself, an inexhaustible theme of subtle interpretations. ”

“ Or shall we refuse to determine what is the meaning of voluntary and involuntary, and maintain that our words have come down from heaven, and that they should be at once embodied in a law?' All states legislate under the idea that there are two classes of actions, the voluntary and the involuntary, but there is great confusion about them in the minds of men; and the law can never act unless they are distinguished. ”