Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/255

 efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious person.

It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article, and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries, occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices, opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed, moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.

That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology. The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express themselves in the phrase, "There ought to be a law." It is heard as often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression; no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a strike interrupts