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LEWIS MUMFORD

POLITICS

No person shall be a Representative who ... shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.... No person shall be a Senator who ... shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

Specialists in political archaeology will recognize these sentences: they are from Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the constitution of the United States. I have heard and forgotten how they got there; no doubt the cause lay in the fierce jealousy of the States. But whatever the fact, I have a notion that there are few provisions of the constitution that have had a more profound effect upon the character of practical politics in the Republic, or, indirectly, upon the general colour of American thinking in the political department. They have made steadily for parochialism in legislation, for the security and prosperity of petty local bosses and machines, for the multiplication of pocket and rotten boroughs of the worst sort, and, above all, for the progressive degeneration of the honesty and honour of representatives. They have greased the ways for the trashy and ignoble fellow who aspires to get into Congress, and they have blocked them for the man of sense, dignity, and self-respect. More, perhaps, than any other single influence they have been responsible for the present debauched and degraded condition of the two houses, and particularly of the lower one. Find me the worst ass in Congress, and I'll show you a man they have helped to get there and to stay there. Find me the most shameless scoundrel, and I'll show you another.

If he has genuine ability, it is a sort of accident. If he is thoroughly honest, it is next door to a miracle. Of the 430-odd representatives who carry on so diligently and obscenely at Washington, making laws and determining policies for the largest free nation ever seen in the world, there are not two dozen whose views upon any subject under the sun carry any weight whatsoever outside their own bailiwicks, and there are not a dozen who rise to anything approaching unmistakable force and originality. They are, in the overwhelming main, shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they deal with and too stupid to learn. If, as is often proposed, the United States should adopt the plan of parliamentary responsibility and the ministry should be recruited from the lower house, then it would be difficult, without a radical change in election methods, to fetch up even such pale talents and modest decencies as were assembled for their cabinets by Messrs. Wilson and Harding. The better sort of congressmen, to be sure, acquire after long service a good deal of technical proficiency. They know the traditions and precedents of the two houses; they can find their way in and out of every rathole in the Capitol; they may be trusted to carry on the legislative routine in a more or less shipshape manner. Of such sort are the specialists paraded in the newspapers--on the tariff, on military affairs, on foreign relations, and so on. They come to know, in time, almost as much as a Washington correspondent, or one of their own committee clerks. But the average congressman lifts himself to no such heights of sagacity. He is content to be led by the fugelmen and bellwethers. Examine him at leisure, and you will find that he is incompetent and imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest. The first principles of civilized law-making are quite beyond him; he ends, as he began, a local politician, interested only in jobs. His knowledge is that of a third-rate country lawyer--which he often is in fact. His intelligence is that of a country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His standards of honour are those of a country banker--which he also often is. To demand sense of such a man, or wide and accurate information, or a delicate feeling for the public and private proprieties, is to strain his parts beyond endurance.

The constitution, of course, stops with Congress, but its influence is naturally powerful within the States, and one finds proofs of the fact on all sides. It is taking an herculean effort everywhere to break down even the worst effects of this influence; the prevailing tendency is still to discover a mysterious virtue in the office-holder who was born and raised in the State, or county, or city, or ward. The judge must come from the bar of the court he is to adorn; the mayor must be part and parcel of the local machine; even technical officers, such as engineers and health commissioners, lie under the constitutional blight. The thing began as a belief in local self-government, the oldest of all the sure cures for despotism. But it has gradually taken on the character of government by local politicians, which is to say, by persons quite unable to comprehend the most elemental problems of State and nation, and unfitted by nature to deal with them honestly and patriotically, even if they could comprehend them. Just as prohibition was forced upon the civilized minorities collected in the great cities against their most vigorous and persistent opposition, so the same minorities, when it comes to intra-state affairs, are constantly at the mercy of predatory bands of rural politicians. If there is any large American city whose peculiar problems are dealt with competently and justly by its State legislature, then I must confess that twenty years in journalism have left me ignorant of it. An unending struggle for fairer dealing goes on in every State that has large cities, and every concession to their welfare is won only at the cost of gigantic effort. The State legislature is never intelligent; it represents only the average mind of the county bosses, whose sole concern is with jobs. The machines that they represent are wholly political, but they have no political principles in any rational sense. Their one purpose and function is to maintain their adherents in the public offices, or to obtain for them in some other way a share of the State funds. They are quite willing to embrace any new doctrine, however fantastic, or to abandon any old one, however long supported, if only the business will promote their trade and so secure their power.

This concentration of the ultimate governmental authority in the hands of small groups of narrow, ignorant, and unconscionable manipulators tends inevitably to degrade the actual office-holder, or, what is the same thing, to make office-holding prohibitive to all men not already degraded. It is almost impossible to imagine a man of genuine self-respect and dignity offering himself as a candidate for the lower house--or, since the direct primary and direct elections brought it down to the common level, for the upper house--in the average American constituency. His necessary dealings with the electors themselves, and with the idiots who try more or less honestly to lead them, would be revolting enough, but even worse would be his need of making terms with the professional politicians of his party--the bosses of the local machine. These bosses naturally make the most of the constitutional limitation; it works powerfully in their favour. A local notable, in open revolt against them, may occasionally beat them by appealing directly to the voters, but nine times out of ten, when there is any sign of such a catastrophe, they are prompt to perfume the ticket by bringing forth another local notable who is safe and sane, which is to say, subservient and reliable. The thing is done constantly; it is a matter of routine; it accounts for most of the country bankers, newspaper owners, railroad lawyers, proprietors of cement works, and other such village bigwigs in the lower house. Here everything runs to the advantage of the bosses. It is not often that the notable in rebellion is gaudy enough to blind the plain people to the high merits of his more docile opponent. They see him too closely and know him too well. He shows none of that exotic charm which accounts, on a different plane, for exogamy. There is no strangeness, no mysteriousness, above all, no novelty about him.

It is my contention that this strangle-hold of the local machines would be vastly less firm if it could be challenged, not only by rebels within the constituency, but also by salient men from outside. The presidential campaigns, indeed, offer plenty of direct proof of it. In these campaigns it is a commonplace for strange doctrines and strange men to force themselves upon the practical politicians in whole sections of the country, despite their constant effort to keep their followers faithful to the known. All changes, of whatever sort, whether in leaders or in ideas, are opposed by such politicians at the start, but time after time they are compelled to acquiesce and to hurrah. Bryan, as every one knows, forced himself upon the Democratic party by appealing directly to the people; the politicians, in the main, were bitterly against him until further resistance was seen to be useless, and they attacked him again the moment he began to weaken, and finally disposed of him. So with Wilson. It would be absurd to say that the politicians of his party--and especially the bosses of the old machines in the congressional districts--were in favour of him in 1912. They were actually against him almost unanimously. He got past their guard and broke down their resolution to nominate some more trustworthy candidate by operating directly upon the emotions of the voters. For some reason never sufficiently explained he became the heir of the spirit of rebellion raised by Bryan sixteen years before, and was given direct and very effective aid by Bryan himself. Roosevelt saddled himself upon the Republican party in exactly the same way. The bosses made heroic efforts to sidetrack him, to shelve him, to get rid of him by any means short of homicide, but his bold enterprises and picturesque personality enchanted the people, and if it had not been for the extravagant liberties that he took with his popularity in later years he might have retained it until his death.

The same possibility of unhorsing the machine politicians, I believe, exists in even the smallest electoral unit. All that is needed is the chance to bring in the man. Podunk cannot produce him herself, save by a sort of miracle. If she has actually hatched him, he is far away by the time he has come to his full stature and glitter--in the nearest big city, in Chicago or New York. Podunk is proud of him, and many other Podunks, perhaps, are stirred by his ideas, his attitudes, his fine phrases--but he lives, say, in some Manhattan congressional district which has the Hon. Patrick Googan as its representative by divine right, and so there is no way to get him into the halls of Congress. In his place goes the Hon. John P. Balderdash, State's attorney for five years, State senator for two terms, and county judge for a brief space--and always a snide and petty fellow, always on the best of terms with the local bosses, always eager for a job on any terms they lay down. The yokels vote for the Hon. Mr. Balderdash, not because they admire him, but because their only choice is between him and the Hon. James Bosh. If anything even remotely resembling a first-rate man could come into the contest, if it were lawful for them to rid themselves of their recurrent dilemma by soliciting the interest of such a man, then they would often enough rise in their might and compel their parish overlords, as the English put it, to adopt him. But the constitution protects these overlords in their business, and in the long run the voters resign all thought of deliverance. Thus the combat remains one between small men, and interest in it dies out. Most of the men who go to the lower house are third-raters, even in their own narrow bailiwicks. In my own congressional district, part of a large city, there has never been a candidate of any party, during the twenty years that I have voted, who was above the intellectual level of a corner grocer. No successful candidate of that district has ever made a speech in Congress worth hearing, or contributed a single sound idea otherwise to the solution of any public problem. One and all, they have confined themselves exclusively to the trade in jobs. One and all, they have been ciphers in the house and before the country.

That debate deserves a great deal more study than it will ever get from the historians of American politics, nearly all of whom, whether they lean to the right or to the left, are bedazzled by the economic interpretation of history, and so seek to account for all political phenomena in terms of crop movements, wage scales, and panics in Wall Street. It seems to me that that obsession blinds them to a fact of the first importance, to wit, the fact that political ideas, under a democracy as under a monarchy, originate above quite as often as they originate below, and that their popularity depends quite as much upon the special class interests of professional politicians as it depends upon the underlying economic interests of the actual voters. It is, of course, true, as I have argued, that the people can force ideas upon the politicians, given powerful leaders of a non-political sort, but it is equally true that there are serious impediments to the process, and that it is not successful very often. As a matter of everyday practice the rise and fall of political notions is determined by the self-interest of the practical politicians of the country, and though they naturally try to bring the business into harmony with any great popular movements that may be in progress spontaneously, they by no means wait and beg for mandates when none are vociferously forthcoming, but go ahead bravely on their own account, hoping to drag public opinion with them and so safeguard their jobs. Such is the origin of many affecting issues, later held dear by millions of the plain people. Such was the process whereby prohibition was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority in favour of it.

It was the party system that gave the Anti-Saloon League manipulators their chance, and they took advantage of it with great boldness and cleverness. The two great parties divide the country almost equally; it is difficult to predict, in a given year, whether the one or the other musters the most votes. This division goes down into the lowest electoral units; even in those backward areas where one party has divine grace and the other is of the devil there are factional differences that amount to the same thing. In other words, the average American politician is never quite sure of his job. An election always exposes him to a definite hazard, and he is eager to diminish it by getting help from outside his own following, at whatever cost to the principles he commonly professes. Here lies the opportunity for minorities willing to trade on a realistic political basis. In the old days the prohibitionists refused to trade, and in consequence they were disregarded, for their fidelity to their own grotesque candidates protected the candidates of both the regular parties. But with the coming of the Anti-Saloon League they abandoned this fidelity and began to dicker in a forthright and unashamed manner, quickly comprehensible to all professional politicians. That is, they asked for a pledge on one specific issue, and were willing to swallow any commitment on other issues. If Beelzebub, running on one ticket, agreed to support prohibition, and the Archangel Gabriel, running on another, found himself entertaining conscientious doubts, they were instantly and solidly for Beelzebub, and they not only gave him the votes that they directly controlled, but they also gave him the benefit of a campaign support that was ruthless, pertinacious, extraordinarily ingenious, and overwhelmingly effective. Beelzebub, whatever his swinishness otherwise, was bathed in holy oils; Gabriel's name became a thing to scare children.

Obviously, the support thus offered was particularly tempting to a politician who found himself facing public suspicion for his general political practices--in brief, to the worst type of machine professional. Such a politician is always acutely aware that it is not positive merit that commonly gets a man into public office in the United States, but simply disvulnerability. Even when they come to nominate a President, the qualities the two great parties seek are chiefly the negative ones; they want, not a candidate of forceful and immovable ideas, but one whose ideas are vague and not too tenaciously held, and in whose personality there is nothing to alarm or affront the populace. Of two candidates, that one usually wins who least arouses the distrusts and suspicions of the great masses of undifferentiated men. This advantage of the safe and sane, the colourless and unprovocative, the apparently stodgy and commonplace man extends to the most trivial contests, and politicians are keen to make use of it. Thus the job-seeker with an aura of past political misdemeanour about him was eager to get the Christian immunity bath that the prohibitionists offered him so generously, and in the first years of their fight they dealt almost exclusively with such fellows. He, on his side, promised simply to vote for prohibition--not even, in most cases, to pretend to any personal belief in it. The prohibitionists, on their side, promised to deliver the votes of their followers to him on election day, to cry him up as one saved by a shining light, and, most important of all, to denounce his opponent as an agent of hell. He was free, by this agreement, to carry on his regular political business as usual. The prohibitionists asked no patronage of him. They didn't afflict him with projects for other reforms. All they demanded was that he cast his vote as agreed upon when the signal was given to him.

At the start, of course, such scoundrels frequently violated their agreements. In the South, in particular, dry legislature after dry legislature sold out to the liquor lobby, which, in those days, still had plenty of money. An assemblyman would be elected with the aid of the prohibitionists, make a few maudlin speeches against the curse of drink, and then, at the last minute, vote wet for some thin and specious reason, or for no avowed reason at all. But the prohibition manipulators, as I have said, were excellent politicians, and so they knew how to put down that sort of treason. At the next election they transferred their favour to the opposition candidate, and inasmuch as he had seen the traitor elected at the last election he was commonly very eager to do business. The punishment for the treason was condign and merciless. The dry rabble-rousers, lay and clerical, trumpeted news of it from end to end of the constituency. What was a new and gratifying disvulnerability was transformed into a vulnerability of the worst sort; the recreant one became the county Harry Thaw, Oscar Wilde, Captain Boy-Ed, and Debs. A few such salutary examples, and treason became rare. The prohibitionists, indeed, came to prefer dealing with such victims of their reprisals. They could trust them perfectly, once the lesson had been learned; they were actually more trustworthy than honest believers, for the latter usually had ideas of their own and interfered with the official plans of campaign. Thus, in the end, the professional politicians of both parties came under the yoke. The final battle in Congress transcended all party lines; democrats and republicans fought alike for places on the band-wagon. The spectacle offered a searching and not unhumorous commentary on the party system, and on the honour of American politicians no less. Two-thirds, at least, of the votes for the amendment were cast by men who did not believe in it, and who cherished a hearty hope, to the last moment, that some act of God would bring about its defeat.

H. L. MENCKEN

JOURNALISM

The standardization of the newspaper reader and the standardization of the journalist are two aspects of the same thing. As a citizen, a workman, a human being, the journalist is simply one of us, a victim of the conformity which has overwhelmed the American. When we speak of the influence of the journalist, we are not speaking of an individual, but of "the powers behind him," of which he is nothing but the wage-earning servant, as impotent and unimportant, considered as an individual, as a mill-hand. Journalism in America is no longer a profession, through which a man can win to a place of real dignity among his neighbours. If we had a Horace Greeley to-day, he would not be editor of a newspaper. He would not wish to be, and he would not be allowed to be. Certainly his vigorous integrity would not be tolerated in the modern unworthy successor of the newspaper which he founded. The editor of a newspaper is no doubt often a man of intelligence and experience and he may be well paid, like the manager of a department store; but he is usually submerged in anonymity except that from time to time the law requires the newspaper to publish his name. His subordinates, assistant editors, newswriters, reporters, and the rest, are as nameless as floor-walkers, shipping clerks, salesladies, and ladies engaged in more ancient forms of commerce.

As for the continental papers, one who does not read any of them regularly is in no position to judge. In 1900 William James, a shrewd observer, wrote in a letter: "The Continental papers of course are 'nowhere.' As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the 'dark ages' being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to 'organs of publicity.'" This is only a passing remark in an informal letter. But it is a partial explanation of American yellow journalism which in twenty years has swamped the whole press, including papers that pretend to be respectable, and it suggests what the state of things was, and is, in France.

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of the journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, there might conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the right sort of impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a dispassionate fidelity to facts. But there has been no such gain. Responsibility has been transferred from the journalist to his employers, and he is on his mettle to please his employers, to cultivate whatever virtues are possible to journalism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in searching out and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his employers demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary human being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no pleasure in lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with unfounded or unverified statements. And if his manager orders him to find a story where there is no story, or to find a story of a certain kind where the facts lead to a story of another kind, he will not come back empty-handed lest he go away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has worked in a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two classes, those who are too stupid to be discontented with any aspect of their position except the size of their salaries, and those who hope either to rise to the better paid positions, or to "graduate," as they put it, from daily journalism to other kinds of literary work.

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, "Liberty and the News": "Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage." That is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply her trade--which is indeed the attitude of some people in comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as "eminences on a rather flat plateau" are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann's suggestion that our salvation lies "ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook," is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a successful editor and writer of special articles. "In this game," he said, "you lose your soul."

The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in newspaper work and have been fired might be valuable if they were collated and if the better journalists would unite to lay the foundation in fact of more such stories. But a profession, a trade, which has so little sense of its own interest that it does not even make an effective union to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite in the impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. The individual who charges against an enormous unshakable institution with the weapons of his personal experience is too easily disposed of as a sore-head and is likely to be laughed at even by his fellow-journalists who know that in the main he is right.

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied "The Brass Check" carefully for the selfish purpose of getting enough material so that the writing of this chapter should be nothing but a lazy man's task of transcription, not to speak of the noble ethical purpose of reforming the newspaper by exposing its iniquities. I confess I am disappointed. "The Brass Check" is a mixture of autobiography, valuable in its way to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely, and of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be handled in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of "training and outlook," who has shown in at least one of his novels an excellent sense of construction, could throw together such a hodge-podge of valid testimony, utterly damning to his opponents, and na?ve trivialities, assertions insecurely founded and not important if they were well founded. I am so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am reluctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encouragement to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and securely entrenched. But as a journalist of "training and outlook" I lament that another journalist of vastly more ability, experience, and information should not have done better work in selecting and constructing his material. As a lawyer said to his client, "You are a saint and you are right, but a court-room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad witness." Mr. Sinclair's evidence, however, is all there to be dug out by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it is valid and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is sufficient to show the sinister forces behind the newspapers and to explain some of the reasons why the newspapers are untrustworthy, cowardly, and dishonest.

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed the reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying shoddy goods. Mr. Lippmann says: "There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled." And Mr. Sinclair says: "The people want the news; the people clamour for the news." Both these statements may be true. But where do the learned doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems, are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said or heard somebody else say: "That's only a newspaper story," or "You cannot believe everything you read." But such mild scepticism shows no promise of swelling to an angry demand on the part of that vague aggregate, the People, for better, more honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as you can actually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and lower taxes.

From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The newspaper is a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a profit; it is also a department store, and it has some characteristics that suggest the variety show and the brothel. But the newspaper differs from all other commodities in that it does not live by what it receives from the consumer who buys it. Three cents multiplied a million times does not support a newspaper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the manufacturer's point of view, and also to a great extent from the reader's point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of "reading matter," so called, are little more than bait to attract enough readers to make the paper worth while as a vehicle for advertisements. It is of no importance to the management whether a given column contain news from Washington or Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny story, as long as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it and so to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits of a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit of clothes at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be a good variety and a certain balance of interest in the columns of reading matter to secure the attention of all kinds of people. This accounts for two things, the great development in the newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment, of more or less clever features, at the expense of space that might be devoted to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out by his chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the office, to get a "story." This is sound psychology. Everybody likes a story, and there are only a few souls in the world who yearn at breakfast for information. To attack the newspaper for being sensational is to forget that all the great stories of the world, from the amatory exploits of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs. Black, the banker's wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news columns except their power to attract the reader and so secure circulation and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser has as his primary interest only that of bringing to the attention of a certain number of people the virtues of his suspenders, shoes, and soothing syrup.

But the advertiser has a secondary interest. The newspaper willy-nilly deals with ideas, such as they are. No idea inimical to the advertiser's business or in general to the business system of which he is a dependent part must be allowed in the paper. Therefore all newspapers are controlled by the advertising department, that is, the counting-room. They are controlled negatively and positively. We are discussing general characteristics and have not space for detailed evidence. But one or two cases will suffice.

The power of the advertiser to make the newspaper servile and right in its opinions is not confined to the local department store or the special industry operating through a district press. Nor is it confined to the negative punishment of withdrawing advertising of commodities like hosiery, chewing gum, and banking service from papers that offend their masters. There is another method of exerting this power, and that is to buy advertising space in which to set forth ideas calculated to influence public opinion. Here is a full page from a New York paper containing a cartoon and text, the main idea of which is that Labour and Capital should pull together. It is signed by "'America First' Publicity Association" and is Bulletin No. 115 in a series--"be sure to read them all." This full-page bulletin, of which there have already been more than a hundred, appeared in many newspapers--I do not know how many; and a full page costs a good deal of money. What is the object of this patriotic association? The prevailing theme of the bulletins which I have seen is "Labour be good! Fight Bolshevism! Beware the Agitator!" Who is going to be influenced by these bulletins? Not the workingman. He knows what he wants, and if he is the dupe of agitators and false theories, these sermons can never rescue him. Not the capitalist. He knows what he wants, and gets it. Perhaps the little middle-class fellow may swallow such buncombe on his daily journey between his office and his home in the suburbs. But he is already an intellectually depraved servant of the employing classes, and it is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete and confirm his corruption. The primary object of the advertisement is to keep the newspaper "good," to encourage its editorial departments, through the advertising department, not to fall below 99 and 44/100% pure Americanism or admit ideas inimical to the general interests of chambers of commerce, manufacturers' associations, and other custodians of the commonweal. I suspect that some clever advertising man has stung the gentlemen who supply the money for this campaign of education, but what is a few million to them? The man who can best afford to laugh is the business manager of the newspaper when he looks at the check and meditates on the easy money of some of his advertising clients and the easy credulity of some of his reading clients.

It may be argued that the newspaper, which is a business, ought to be controlled, directly and indirectly, by business interests; and certainly if we allow the commercial powers to manage our food supply, transportation, and housing, it is a relatively minor matter if the same powers dominate our press. In like manner if we tolerate dishonest governments, we are only dealing with an epiphenomenon when we consider the dishonest and inefficient treatment by the press of public affairs, national and international. All the news of politics, diplomacy, war, world-trade emanates from government officials or from those who are interested in turning to their own advantage the actions of officials. Business is behind government, and government is behind business; which comes first is unimportant like the problem of the chicken and the egg. It is a partnership of swindle, and though the details of the relation are infinitely complicated, the relation in itself is easy to understand and accounts quite simply for the fact that world news is the most viciously polluted of all the many kinds of news. The efforts of a merchant to keep up the good name of his department store, or of a group of manufacturers to break a strike are feeble and even reasonable, so far as they use the newspapers, compared to the audacious perversion of truth by the combination of arch criminals, government and international business.

JOHN MACY

THE LAW

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." This outcry of Jack Cade's followers that the disappearance of the whole profession was the initial step in man's progress toward a better world would be echoed in the United States by the revolutionists of to-day, and also by not a few solid business men who have nothing else in common with the mediaeval agitator except perhaps the desire to see the fountains run wine and make it a felony to drink near-beer. Indeed almost every one takes his fling at the law. Doctors and ministers can be avoided if we dislike them, but the judge has a sure grip upon us all. He drags us before him against our will; no power in the land can overturn his decision, but defeated litigants, disappointed sociologists, and unsuccessful primary candidates all join in a prolonged yell, "Kill the umpire."

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Underneath all this agitation is a deep-seated suspicion and dissatisfaction aroused by the legal profession and the whole machinery of justice. It exists despite the fact observed by Bryce, that our system of written constitutions has created a strongly marked legal spirit in the people and accustomed them to look at all questions in a legal way--a characteristic exemplified when other peoples judged the Covenant of the League of Nations as an expression of broad policies and the aspirations of a hundred years, while we went at it word by word with a dissecting knife and a microscope as if it had been a millionaire's will or an Income Tax Act. Moreover, although lawyers as a class are unpopular, they are elected to half the seats in the legislatures and in Congress. The profession which cannot boast a single English Prime Minister in the century between Perceval and Asquith, has trained every President who was not a general, except Harding. Perhaps this very fact that lawyers receive public positions out of all proportion to their numbers partially accounts for the prejudice felt against them by men in other professions and occupations.

The training of the few Colonists who did become lawyers may be judged from that of an early attorney general of Rhode Island:

"When he made up his mind to study law, he went into the garden to exercise his talents in addressing the court and jury. He then selected five cabbages in one row for judges, and twelve in another row for jurors. After trying his hand there a while, he went boldly into court and took upon himself the duties of an advocate, and a little observation and experience there convinced him that the same cabbages were in the court house which he thought he had left in the garden,--five in one row and twelve in another."

The natural alienation of such attorneys from the intricacies of English law was increased by occasional conflicts between that system and Colonial statutes or conceptions of justice. An excellent Connecticut act for the disposal of a decedent's land was declared void by the Privy Council in London as contrary to the laws of England, and the attempt of the New York governor and judges to enforce the obnoxious English law of libel in the prosecution of Peter Zenger in order to throttle the criticism of public officials by the press, would have succeeded if the jury had not deliberately rejected the legal definitions given by the court.

At this moment a rival to the Common Law presented itself in the Napoleonic code of 1804, attractive to the populace just because it was French, and to many of the bar because of its logical arrangement and because unlike English lawyers they were widely read in Roman and modern Continental law. For a time it was actually doubtful whether the legal assistance which American judges needed would be drawn from England or France. French writers were cited in the courts and Livingston drafted a code on the Napoleonic model for Louisiana. The English law had, however, one great advantage. It was written in our own language. Furthermore, a group of exceptionally able judges such as Joseph Story and James Kent, by their decisions and writings, virtually imported the great bulk of the Common Law into this country and reworked it to meet American conditions. Nevertheless, this law was something that came from outside and had not grown up altogether from the lives and thoughts of our own people, so that it has never meant to Americans what English law means to Englishmen, for whom it is as much a product of their own land as parliamentary government or the plays of Shakespeare.

Another reason for American hostility to law was found at the frontier. The pioneer, imbued with the conviction that he was entitled to the land which he had cleared, ploughed and sown, often thrown by crop failures into debt to the tradesmen in the town, resented law as something which was forced upon him by people who led easy lives, who took his land away for some technical defect of title, foreclosed mortgages, compelled him to pay for goods of high prices and low quality, suppressed hereditary feuds, and substituted a mass of book learning which he was too ignorant or too busy to read, for the simple principles of fair play which seemed sufficient to him. Habitual obedience to law was a spirit which could not develop in men who were largely squatters, and who, from the outset of our national history, disregarded the Congressional statutes which required that public lands must be surveyed before they were settled. Sometimes, as in this instance, the settler's resistance to law was successful. More often they were overpowered by the strength of civilization and submitted to the law sullen and unconvinced.

The old frontier is gone, a new frontier has arisen. The meeting place of unfriendly races has moved Eastward from the Missouri to the Merrimac. The pioneers of to-day came often from autocratic lands where law was something imposed on them from above, and they were slow to regard our law as different in kind. It was not a part of themselves. Moreover, they did not find in America the energetic police organization which had compelled their obedience in Europe. The men who framed our system of laws were taught by Puritanism that duties declared by those lawfully in authority should be voluntarily performed. A statute once on the books got much vitality from this spirit and from the social pressure of the homogeneous settled communities, whatever the difficulties of enforcement at the frontier. These forces behind law became weaker when the population was split into numerous and diverse races by the great tide of immigration. Obedience to law, never automatic among us, now became liable to cease altogether whenever a person thought the law unreasonable or felt fairly certain that he would not be found out.

This belief that a law ceases to have obligation when it becomes inexpedient to obey it, extends far beyond the recently arrived elements in our population. For instance, a wealthy man with several American generations behind him, who was serving on the jury in an accident case, stood up on a chair as soon as the jury got into the consultation-room and urged them to disregard everything which the judge had instructed them about the inability of the plaintiff to recover if he, as well as the defendant, was negligent. "This doctrine of contributory negligence," said this educated juryman, "is not the law of France or Germany or any country on the Continent of Europe. A number of eminent writers agree that it is a thoroughly bad law. Let's have nothing to do with it." Needless to say, the plaintiff recovered. This conception of a higher law than that on the books may owe something to the Abolitionists' belief that they were not bound by the laws protecting the inhuman institution of slavery. Many conscientious persons still hold that a man ought not to be punished for disobeying a law which he believes to be morally wrong. Fortunately, a corrective to this dangerous doctrine of the inner legal light is found in the words of a leading Abolitionist, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, in charging the Grand Jury on riotous resistance to the fugitive slave law, although he himself regarded it as vicious legislation:

"A man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a law recognized by the community must take the consequences of that disobedience. It is a matter solely between him and his Maker. He should take good care that he is not mistaken, that his private opinion does not result from passion or prejudice, but, if he believes it to be his duty to disobey, he must be prepared to abide by the result; and the laws as they are enacted and settled by the constituted authorities to be constitutional and valid, must be enforced, although it may be to his grievous harm. It will not do for the public authorities to recognize his private opinion as a justification of his acts."

Disrespect for law has been aggravated by the changing function of the lawyer since the Civil War. In the forties and fifties, he stood out as a leader in his community, lifted by education above the mass of citizens, often before the public gaze in the court-room and chosen because of his forensic eloquence to deliver many of those set orations which Americans constantly demand, brought forward by the litigation of those days as the avenger of crime, the defender of those unjustly imprisoned, the liberator of the escaping slave, or upholding some great public right on behalf of his city or State--the construction of a toll-free bridge across the Charles, the maintenance of the charter of Dartmouth College. After 1870, this pre-eminence was challenged by the new captains of industry, and their appearance was accompanied by an alteration in the work of many an able lawyer, which soon obscured him to the popular imagination. The formation of large businesses required more and more the skill which he possessed. Rewards for drafting and consultation became greater than for litigation, which was growing tedious and costly, so that his clients avoided it whenever possible. Consequently, he changed from an advocate into a "client care-taker," seldom visible to the people and often associated in their minds with the powerful and detested corporations which he represented. Much of the prejudice against "corporation lawyers" was unjust, and the business development of to-day would have been impossible without the skill in organization and reorganization of great enterprises which they displayed during the last half century. However, popular opinion of a class is inevitably based, not on all its members, but on a conspicuous few, and the kind of legal career described in Winston Churchill's "Far Country" was common enough to furnish data for damaging generalizations. In any case, the decline in the public influence of the bar was inevitable, especially as certain businesses retained the exclusive legal services of a staff of men, so that it could be said: "Lawyers used to have clients; now, clients have lawyers."

Of course, during this period there were many lawyers who made a notable success by conducting cases against corporations. These accident lawyers were, however, no more popular than their opponents, even with the workingmen whom they represented. The small means of their clients made any remuneration from them improbable unless damages were recovered. Consequently, the lawyer agreed to take nothing if defeated, but to even matters up insisted on a large fraction of the amount awarded, usually one-third or even more, if he won. Therefore, he fought not merely for justice and his client, but for his own fee, and the temptation to win by every possible means was great. Business men were quick to label him unscrupulous, while workingmen resented it when a large slice of the money which the jury gave to them as a just measure for suffering a lifelong disability vanished into some lawyer's pockets.

No satisfactory substitute for the contingent fee was suggested, but the prejudice created by the system and by the dislike of corporation lawyers was too great to be dispelled by the many members of the bar whose practice lay in neither of these two fields. And indeed, the profession as a whole cannot free itself from blame for some very definite evils, soon to be discussed. Unfortunately, the long-standing antagonism between lawyers and laymen has distracted the thoughts of both sides from wrongs which ought to be and can be cured, and turned them to never-ending disputes on problems of relatively small importance. For instance, almost any layman will open a discussion of the function of the lawyer by condemning the profession because it defends criminals who are known to be guilty. The solution of this problem is not easy, but it is not worth a hundredth of the attention it receives, for it hardly ever arises. The criminal law is a small part of the whole law, and lawyers who have spent their whole lives in that field have declared that they were not certain of the guilt of a single client. A far more important problem is whether a lawyer should advocate the passage of legislation which he personally considers vicious. Indeed, the underlying question, to which lawyers and laymen ought to be devoting themselves, is this. How far can the State ascertain the proper course of action by limiting itself to hearing paid representatives of the persons directly interested, financially or otherwise; or should the State also call in and pay trained men to investigate the question independently? The solution of this question will affect not only lawyers, but other professions as well. Medical experts, for instance, might cease to be hired by millionaires to prove them insane, or by the prosecuting attorney with the opposite purpose, but might be employed by the court to make an impartial inquiry into the mental condition of a prisoner. In short, it may be that we have carried the notion of litigation as a contest of wits between two sides so far that the interests of society have not been adequately safeguarded.

If laymen have erred in concentrating on minor points, lawyers have been far too ready to deny laymen any right to discuss law at all. It is just as if school-teachers should maintain that parents and citizens in general have no concern in the problems of education. The time has come to close the gulf in American life between the legal profession and the people who are ruled by laws. Law is the surface of contact where the pressure of society bears upon the individual. Doubtless, he attributes to the law many of the features in this pressure to which he objects, whereas they actually result from the social structure itself. The man who feels wronged by a prosecution for bigamy, or for stealing bread when he is starving for lack of employment, cannot expect to change the law without also changing the views of the community on monogamous marriage and the organization of industry. These institutions of society show themselves in the law just as the veins in a block of marble show themselves at the surface, but it is as futile for him to blame the law for "capitalism," private property, or our present semi-permanent marriages as to try to get rid of the veins by scraping the surface of the marble. On the other hand, there are aspects of law which do not correspond to any existing social requirements or demands, and the layman has good cause to offer his opinion. And it may be worth listening to. The onlooker often sees most of the game. Although the layman may lack technical knowledge, he can appreciate the relation of law to his own department of human activity--business, social service, health--in ways that are difficult for the lawyer who is absorbed in the pressing tasks of each day. Moreover, the lawyer's habitual and necessary obligation to conform to existing laws naturally inclines him to overlook their defects, which are obvious to those who can spend in detached criticism the same time which he requires for practical application. Modern medicine was created by Pasteur, who was not a doctor; modern English law by Bentham, who was a lawyer to the extent of arguing one case and who was edited by Mill, a philosopher and economist.

Knowledge is no longer a matter of water-tight compartments. "All good work is one," says Wells in "Joan and Peter." Law touches psychology in its treatment of the defective and insane, medicine and surgery in industrial accidents and disease, political science in municipal corporations, economics in taxation, philosophy in its selection of the purposes it should strive to accomplish. And this is a meagre list. The greatest need of American law is the establishment of means for intelligent mutual understanding and effective co-operation, not merely between lawyers and experts in such other fields as those mentioned, but between lawyers and the mass of our population, who fill the jails, pay the taxes, drink city water, get hurt in factories, buy, sell, invest, build homes, and leave it all to their children when they die.

For these men and women have a right to complain of our law. Its evils are not those commonly decried, lawyers to defend the guilty, reliance on precedents instead of common sense, bribed judges. The real defect is failure to keep up to date. Many existing legal rules have the same fault as New York surface-cars before the subway or Hoboken Ferries before the tubes. They were good in their day, but it has gone by and they cannot handle the traffic. The system formulated by Story and Kent worked well for the farms, small factories, and small banks of their time, but the great development of national resources and crowded cities presented new situations unsuited to the old legal rules, and kept men too busy for the constructive leisure necessary for thinking out a new system. The law became a hand-to-mouth affair, deciding each isolated problem as it arose, and often deciding it wrong. Yet lawyers were satisfied with law, just as business men with business. Then came the agitation of the last fifteen years, which has at least made us discontented about many things. The next task is to stop calling each other names, sit down together, think matters through to a finish, and work together to complete the process which is farther along than we realize, of making over the common law system of an agricultural population a century ago to meet the needs of the city-dwelling America of to-day.

The public might understand, for example, why law does not progress so conspicuously and rapidly as medicine or engineering. Part of the blame rests, no doubt, upon lawyers, who have been less active than other professions in discussing and applying new ideas, but the very nature of the subject is an obstacle to quick change. In law, progress requires group action; the individual can accomplish little. The physician who discovers a new antitoxin, the surgeon who invents a new method of operating for gastric ulcer, can always, if his reputation be established, find some patient upon whom to test his conception. Its excellence or its faults can be rapidly proved to his own mind and that of any skilled onlooker. And new ideas, if sound, mean a larger practice and money in his pocket. The lawyer gets no such rewards for improving the law, and has no such opportunities for experiment. If he is convinced by observation, wide reading, and long thinking, that arrest for debt should be abolished, or the property of a spendthrift protected by law from his creditors, or trial by jury abandoned except in criminal trials, he cannot try out these theories upon some client. He must sacrifice days from his regular work to persuade a whole legislature to test his idea upon thousands of citizens, and if the idea is a bad one, the experiment will be a widespread disaster. Consequently law reform always faces an instinctive and discouraging legislative opposition. Even after every State except two had adopted the Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, the Georgia legislature refused to do so because the Act abolished days of grace, the old custom allowing a debtor three days beyond the time of payment named in his note. They said that when a man had promised to pay a debt on May 1, it was un-American not to let him wait till May 4. Again, a committee of very able New York lawyers recently drew a short Practice Act setting forth the main requirements for the conduct of a law-suit, and leaving the details to the judges, who may be supposed to know more about their own work than the legislature. Similar laws have long been in successful operation in England, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, whereas the existing New York Code of Civil Procedure with its thousands of sections has been a vexatious source of delay and disputes in the press of urban litigation. The new measure was an admirable and thorough piece of work, endorsed by the Bar Associations of New York City and the State. Yet it was killed by the age-long opposition of the country to the town. Upstate lawyers, less harassed by the old Code because of uncrowded rural dockets, objected to throwing over their knowledge of the existing system and spending time to learn a new and better one. The legislature hated to give more power to the courts. As a result, the new bill was scrapped, and nothing has been done after years of agitation except to renumber the sections of the old Code with a few improvements.

Another factor in law reform is the existence of fifty legal systems in one nation. Even if the law is modernized in one State, the objectionable old rule will remain in the other forty-seven until their legislatures are persuaded by the same tedious process. On the other hand, this diversity has its merits. Some of the progressive Western States serve as experiment stations for testing new legal and governmental schemes. Still more important, the limitations on legal experimentation are somewhat offset by the opportunities for observation of the workings of different legal rules in neighbouring States. The possibilities of this comparative method for judging the best solution of a legal problem have not yet been fully utilized. For example, a dispute has long raged whether it is desirable to compel a doctor to disclose professional secrets on the witness-stand without the patient's consent. About half the States require him to keep silent. The reasons given are, that patients will seek medical aid less freely if their confidences may be disclosed; doctors would lie to shield their patients; some doctors are hired by employers to treat workmen injured in accidents and will try to get evidence on behalf of the employers if they are allowed to testify. So far, the discussion has turned on the probability or improbability that these arguments represent the facts, and neither side has collected the facts. The discussion could be brought down to earth by an investigation in New York which has the privilege, and Massachusetts, where secrecy is not maintained. Are doctors less consulted in Massachusetts, do they perjure themselves, do they ingratiate themselves with workmen to defeat subsequent accident suits? Statistics, personal interviews with judges and physicians, and examination of the stenographic records of trials ought to give valuable assistance in determining which half of the States has the better rule.

Since law reform requires highly organized group action, some individual should be charged with the responsibility of organization. At present, it is everybody's business. Judges are hearing cases all day and writing opinions at night, and they have no legislative position as in England, where they can draft bills and present them in the House of Lords. Individual lawyers carry little weight. The Bar Associations have accomplished much, but the work of their members is done without pay in the intervals of practice, and they have no official standing. The Attorney General is necessarily a partisan, representing the State's side in litigation, with neither the time nor the duty to improve the law in general. The United States and the larger States badly need a Minister of Justice. All complaints of legal inefficiency would come to him, and he would be constantly collecting statistics of the cases in the courts and their social consequences, observing procedure personally, or through a corps of expert assistants, conferring with the judges and the Bar Associations, drafting or examining measures affecting the administration of justice and giving his opinion about them to the legislature, and charged with the general duty of ascertaining whether every person can find a certain remedy from the laws for all injuries or wrongs, obtaining right and justice freely and without purchase, completely and without denial, promptly and without delay.

Until we establish such an official, we can rely on three instruments of legal advance, each of which may be a point of co-operation between lawyers and laymen. Of the first, the Bar Associations, something has already been said. The second is the judiciary. Unfortunately, the tendency of the American antagonism to law to concentrate on personal topics has warped the prolonged discussion of this branch of our government during the last ten years, and, indeed, since 1789. Charges of corruption and incompetency against individual judges, and methods of getting a bad judge off the bench, have entirely obscured the problem of getting good judges on the bench. The power of judges to declare statutes unconstitutional and void makes them the controlling factor in our government, yet there is no country where less attention is paid to their selection and training. It is of no use to recall a poor judge by popular vote if the people are eager to put one of the same type in his place. Nothing need be added to the estimate in Bryce's "Modern Democracies" of the unevenness of judicial personnel. The most obvious need, if the inferior judges are to be brought up to the level of the best men, is for higher salaries. But that alone is not enough to induce leaders of the bar to become judges. No salary could be so high as the income of successful metropolitan lawyers. The time has come for greater willingness on their part to retire from a large practice in middle life and devote their talents to judicial work. And even this will be useless, unless selection is based on merit. Our system of an elective judiciary is probably too deeply rooted to be entirely abandoned, though it is clear that legal talent is not a quality, like executive ability, readily capable of being appraised by the electorate. On the other hand, it is not altogether certain that State governors would appoint judges without regard to partisan considerations. An interesting compromise plan has been suggested, that there should be a Chief Justice, elected by the people, who should be in effect the Minister of Justice already described. All the other judges would be appointed by him, for life or for long terms, while his responsibility for wise selections would be secured by a short term or even by the recall. A governor does so many tasks that his judicial appointments do not play a large part in the popular judgment of his record, but the Chief Justice would stand or fall on the merits of the administration of law under his management.

Moreover, we do not deal fairly by the judges chosen under existing systems. After they have been selected, they should have more opportunity to study the special duties of their position before beginning work, and more leisure amid trials and opinions for general legal reading and for observation of the complexities of modern life which are inevitably involved in their decisions, especially on constitutional questions. Most litigation grows out of urban and industrial conditions, with which State supreme court judges may easily get out of touch, if they remain continuously in the State House in a small upstate city like Springfield, Albany, or Sacramento, with little opportunity to visit the factories and tenements of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. It may also be doubted whether our usual system which restricts some judges to trials and others to appellate work is wise; an occasional change from one to the other is both refreshing and instructive. Judges frequently complain of the monotony of their work, cooped up with a few associates of similar mental interests, so that the atmosphere may acquire the irritability of a boarding-house. It is not generally understood how much judges are cut off from other men. Close intimacy with their former friends at the bar or with wealthy business men who may have cases before them, is sure to cause talk. Graham Wallas's suggestion of an occasional transfer to active work of a semi-judicial character, like Judge Sankey's chairmanship of the English Coal Commission, seems valuable. Our Interstate Commerce Commission would provide such an opportunity. Finally, the existing gulf between courts and law schools might be narrowed by summer conferences on growing-points in the law, where each side could give much out of its experience to the other.

The remaining instrument of progress is the law schools. "Legal education," says Bryce, "is probably nowhere so thorough as in the United States." The chief reasons for this success are two, the professional law teacher, who has replaced the retired judge and the practising lawyer who lectured in his spare hours; and the case-system of instruction. This method is not, as is popularly believed, the memorization by the students of the facts of innumerable cases. It imparts legal principles, not on the say-so of a text-book or a professor, but by study and discussion of the actual sources of those principles, the decisions of the courts. The same method in the Continental Law would result in a class-room discussion of codes and commentators, which are there the sources. One of the most interesting signs of its success is its spread from law into other sciences such as medicine. Books based on the study of concrete situations are used in public schools for the study of geography and hygiene, and charitable societies work out the general needs of the community from the problems of individual families. This system has superseded in all the leading law schools the old methods of lecturing and reading treatises. Its most conspicuous service is, of course, vocational, the training of men whose advice a client can safely accept. Already some States have required a law-school degree as a condition of admission to the bar, and the old haphazard law-office apprenticeship will eventually disappear, although the question of how far a man who is earning his living should be allowed to study law in his spare hours at a night law school whose standards must usually be lower than a full-time school remains as a difficult problem in a democratic country. Efficiency of training conflicts with equality of opportunity. A second service of the leading law schools is the modernization of the law through the production of books. A great example of this is the "Treatise on Evidence," by John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law School, which is every day influencing courts and renovating the most antiquated portion of the common law.

Of late years, the need for fresh changes in method has become plain. Christopher Columbus Langdell, the inventor of the case-system, laid down two fundamental propositions: "First, that law is a science; second, that all the available materials of that science are contained in printed books." Experience has proved that he was right in believing that attendance in a lawyer's office or at the proceedings of courts was not essential to a legal education. But the scope of legal study must now extend beyond printed books, certainly beyond law books. Since law is not an isolated department of knowledge, but a system of rules for the regulation of human life, the truth of those rules must be tested by many facts outside the past proceedings of courts and legislatures. Not only law in books but law in action has to be considered, and after learning the principles evolved by a process of inclusion and exclusion in the decisions or by intermittent legislative action, the scholar must find how those principles actually work in the bank, the factory, the street, and the jail. The problem is still debated, whether this can better be done in the pre-legal college course or by the use of non-legal experts in the law schools, or whether the necessary material should be assimilated and presented by the law teachers themselves. Yet this widening of the content of legal study does not in the least impair the validity of Langdell's method, the systematic investigation of the sources of law at first hand, whether those sources be found in the reports and statutes which he had in mind, or in the economic, social, and psychological facts which have demanded attention in recent years.

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