Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/615

Rh early manhood of its life, after all the early struggles for its self-conscious existence, or for its independence, are over; and yet, before it has developed within itself all the complicated machinery of a highly-organized commercial and social life. In such a state there must, by the very hypothesis, be a more or less steadily fixed government, whether that government approach more to a monarchical, or an aristocratical, or a democratical type. The stability of the state, and its self-dependence, imply agriculture, and agriculture implies property or ownership. The division of labor, again, which this economical condition presupposes, involves the habit of making contracts, even though they be of the most elementary form. The social condition cannot but rest upon a previously-developed, though now strongly-fortified, domestic condition, and this implies the fact of marriage, and the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, and the like. The still remaining anarchical tendencies of certain individual members of the state, lagging behind the rest, will generate occasional acts of violence, threatening, directly or indirectly, the very life and existence of the state. These acts will excite the horror of all the more orderly members of the community, and will be denominated by some such term as crimes.

It is obvious that the characteristic classes of facts, which have just been alluded to, are so general and simple, that their necessary occurrence at a certain epoch, in the progress of every state, may be predicted as a certainty. These facts, however, in themselves, are of the utmost possible moment, and involve, by their permanence and universality, the elementary ingredients of a science of law.

It will be seen that these facts, looked upon as a whole, imply, first, a certain number of definite relations of persons to one another, whether as governors or governed, husbands or wives, parents or children, or as otherwise allied by blood or marriage. Secondly, these facts involve certain determinate relations between the persons in the community, in respect of the things (or physical substances) appertaining to the community as a whole. These things, severally, are owned by one or another, and not by the rest. The ownership of these things is the subject-matter of private arrangements and contracts between different members of the community. The violent or fraudulent abstraction of a thing owned from the owner may be one of the acts on the general prevention of which the very life of the community is held to depend, and as such is denominated a crime.

Again, the classes of facts already enumerated have two distinct sides to them, one touching the outward lives of members of the community, that is, their acts; the other touching their inward lives, that is, their thoughts and feelings. Over the former of these sides the whole of the community can, by its aggregate pressure, exert a considerable amount of force, of a specifically ascertained quantity and quality. Over the latter side, that touching the thoughts and feelings