Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/166

 a better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to suffer.

Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees, and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs,