Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/247

Rh of the several states. It also accounts for our system of checks and balances. A modern urban community, if left to itself, would hardly shackle its power to act by such devices. The Kentucky mountaineer who carries his individualism to the point of taking the law into his own hands in place of relying upon the regularly constituted authorities is the forerunner of the present rural point of view. Moreover, the farmer is less familiar with social and economic changes than people who live in cities. Agriculture is less subject to revolutionary changes in machine production than manufactures. Tradition is more potent in the country than in the city. The opportunity for keeping public opinion abreast of the times by publicity and discussion is better where population is dense than where it is sparse. The vote on the forty-two amendments to the constitution of Ohio submitted to the voters in 1912 illustrates the condition of the rural mind. Of the thirtyfour amendments adopted, all, save woman suffrage, carried in the twelve leading urban counties of the state. Nineteen of these amendments would have been defeated without the vote of the urban counties. Seven amendments were defeatd "in spite of the favorable majorities cast by the cities." The urban counties contain less than half the population of the state. Nevertheless, "every amendment that passed received its heaviest majority in the cities."

The average farmer can have little conception of the problems which confront the modern city. Rural constituencies are proverbially conservative on questions outside of their experience. In a law-abiding country community, a suit for damages may prove an adequate remedy for occasional infractions of the law, but in an urban environment far more latitude should be given administrative officers, such as factory, tenement-house and meat inspectors, to prevent anti-social practices. The modern city is mainly a development of the last fifty years. It is not surprising, therefore, that the judicial mind steeped mainly in the old traditions of the law sometimes fails to do justice. The Court of Appeals in New York has usually been made up almost entirely of what are called "up-state" judges. The Supreme Court of Illinois consists of seven judges elected from as many districts. The seventh district includes the city of Chicago and comprises 46.4 per cent, of the population of the state. Courts constituted in this way may easily blunder in deciding cases that affect the metropolis.

Professor Roscoe Pound, of the Harvard Law School, says:

Almost all of the backwardness of American courts with respect to social problems and social legislation has been backwardness with respect to social problems of our cities and social legislation for our cities. Is it not obvious what a difference it would have made if the every-day social relations of the judges of our highest courts had been in New York instead of Albany, Chicago