Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/280

 writer that he knew of no intellectual pleasure so delightful as that of discovering how to circumvent the provisions of an Act of Parliament. This diverting, if immoral, remark illustrates the faults of a social system in which laws are made chiefly by persons having little experience in the working of laws, and elected to that duty by persons having no such experience at all. Having in mind the fact that international law is already relegated practically to specialists, it requires no great effort of imagination to foresee that the Hercules that will cleanse the Augean stable of the Statute Book will be a committee of professors of law. And once the public has become familiarised with the idea, what more natural than that a similar body should be formed to provide against such legislative blunders as we were all recently laughing at, when, having provided for the restraint of habitual drunkards by placing them on what was called the black list, Parliament presently learned that it had so framed the law that no one could be blacklisted except by his own consent? The development from this to a system by which laws would not merely be amended, but devised ab ovo, by professional legislators, is easy to foresee; and with properly-devised precautions to ensure that the laws created shall express the will of a sovereign people sufficiently educated in political duty to possess a will worthy