Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/1017

981 BOOK REVIEWS 981 sentative of all the people has no theoretical bounds will admit that there are practical Umits beyond which it is not expedient for government to go, and will find in this book many interesting illustrations of those limits. One of the weaknesses of the study of politics in this country has been its concentration on American and English data, and even then without much consideration of the events of our own time. We have threshed over the old straw until we are sick of it. Unconsciously we have realized that the slavery question, which occupied the thought of our ablest men for forty years, has not much bearing on the problems of to-day. Mr. Laski's book has the great merit of freshness. He brings us a wealth of new facts from contemporary England and from the development of France during the last hundred years. It must be said that the book is solid reading, and that portions of it were written for scholars, but those parts are easily passed over by the general reader. This is not so much a continuous discussion as a series of studies after the plan common in France. Each chapter is a unit and can be read by itself. It would, indeed, have been desirable to indicate more fully the inter- connection and the bearing that all the studies have on the general problem. Persons who are not specialists in politics and history will get most pleasure from the first chapter on recent encroachments upon the traditional irre- sponsibility of the state, and the last chapter, "Administrative Syndicalism in France," with its side lights on civil-service difiiculties in this country. The study of Lamennais adds for most of us a new figure to the great victims of persecution. Chapters two and four, on Bonald and Royer-CoUard, may wisely be left tiU the last as more technical. Royer-CoUard has great significance, however, for he faced intelligently the antinomies of order and freedom which confront us to-day, and Professor Freund has recently directed attention to his scientific scrutiny of the proper limitations of freedom of speech.^ As a foreign observer in our midst, the author's statements about the United States are fuU of interest. The list -of Americans in the preface to whom in- debtedness is acknowledged indicates the insight he has acquired as to our conditions. I shall briefly restate his theory with reference to his American illustrations. We have long recognized in this country that certain individual interests ought to be free from legal control, which is therefore prohibited by our BiUs of Rights. Fashionable as it has been to sneer at those documents in recent years, it may be " that with the great increase of state activity that is so clearly foreshadowed there was never a time when they were so greatly needed." Principles which are the result of social experience are thereby put beyond the reach of ordinary mischance.* We have, however, assumed that there is noth- ing which limits the government except these rights of individuals, ignoring the fact that the state is not the only association to which men are loyal. In his "Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty,"* Mr, Laski narrated several de- feats suffered by the state when it forced men to choose between it and a church in matters of the spirit. In its own sphere the church would seem to be sovereign. We have not realized this in the United States, because religion has been protected from political interference by tradition and law, but it is dis- closed by the way in which the Quakers won exemption from military service during the Civil War and were accorded it as a matter of course in 1917.^ Other charities should also be allowed to live their own lives, growing unfettered by legal restrictions based on the real or supposed wiU of dead men,^ — an inter- » Ernst Freund, "Debs and Free Speech," 19 New Republic, 14 (May 3, 1919). Reviewed in 31 Harv. L. Rev. 1171. ' Page 102.
 * Laski, op. cit., 62, loi.
 * Laski, Authority in the Modern State, 45.