Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/167

 or for soldiers and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for law.

He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed, whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation, without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.

He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy in which we live so much of the time.

It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is a kind of cynicism,