546

THE GREEN BAG

LAISSEZ FAIRE AND THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES BY ANDREW ALEXANDER BRUCE WHAT is the use of the law," says Count Tolstoi? " Are there criminal statutes? Are there prisons in the family? Is not society, is not the Nation but a larger family? Is it not love which is after all supreme?" "I have noticed the herds of wild deer in Siberia," says Prince Kropotkin. "I have seen them as they were crossing a stream and were exposed to the attacks of the wolves. The stags formed themselves into an advance guard, into a rear guard, and circled around the flanks. In the center were the weak, the females and the young. To reach them it was necessary that the wolves should break through the outer circle. There was no law, there were no gendarmes, no Cossacks, no jails. There was the instinct of love, of ser vice and of protection. Are men and women less chivalrous, less loving than the beasts of the field?" These are the protests of the Russian Rev olutionist. Not, however, of the bombthrower nor of the terrorist. One indeed is the protest of a follower of the non-resistant philosophy — the protest of one who, though a scientific anarchist, that is to say a person who is unable to see the necessity of any law, utterly repudiates the gospel of force and holds firmly to the doctrine that, "If one smite thee on the right cheek, thou shouldst turn to him the other also." They are both, however, the protests of men who have seen the government, the police, the army and the courts used as instruments of tyranny and oppression, rather than of helpfulness. They are both the protests of men who have seen the law manifested in the jail and in the club of the policeman, but have not seen the police rescuing men and women from the wheels and hoofs of the on-rushing traffic, nor seen government manifested in schools

and hospitals and asylums. They are above all the protests of men who have lived under a government which has been superimposed, which has emanated from above and not from beneath, whose aim has been to in trench the strong, not to protect and help the weak. It is the laissez faire doctrine of Russia. It in all ages has been the doctrine of the submerged, and this even in Asia where, although power has always been venerated, law has never been appreciated or respected. It was the doctrine everywhere prevalent among the French masses, at the time of the French Revolution. It was no doubt found among the lower strata of Englishmen of the same period, %vho in spite of a great increase in popular liberty by the force of precedent and custom and the growing power of parlia ment, had for a long time been accustomed to look upon government as the property of and the machinery of the strong for the maintenance of their power. Nor was it unshared in by the common people in Amer ica. The colonists were as a rule without fortune, ancestry, or social or political stand ing. They had come from countries where the opportunities of the poor man were but few, and where individual initiative among the lower classes was everywhere restricted by an arbitrary government for purposes of its own, and for the benefit of its own mem bers. They were familiar with the regula tion of wages by statute, or by police magis trates who themselves belonged to the employing classes. They were familiar with the monopolies granted by the crown of almost all of the necessities of life. They were familiar with the mercantile restric tions, which sought to crush out the com merce of Scotland and Ireland and of the American colonies in order that the merchant