Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/279

 alone should be employed in it would probably awaken a torrent of objection not unmingled with execration. But specialism of all sorts will have extended its sway to such an extent a hundred years hence that the likeliest solution of the difficulties at present envisaged is that the business of law-making will be relegated to a specially qualified and specially educated class, and that parliaments, if they exist at all, will have nothing to do with it, but will concern themselves with what they are often rather contumeliously told now is not their business (though it ought to be); namely, the management of international policy. The way in which this evolution will come about is, moreover, fairly easy to imagine. At some time during the century the manifold confusions, inconsistencies and evident inconveniences of the existing corpus of the law are pretty sure to require drastic and laborious treatment, which can only be administered by professional experts. At the same time, the public, having awakened to the ludicrous fact that laws are passed in every session of every Parliament in the world, which, when they come to be administered, break down because they have either been so stupidly and unimaginatively conceived, or so clumsily expressed in the statutes which embody them, that practical working immediately reveals their fatal defects. A clever young lawyer once said to the present