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dividualism which began with the first coming of the English to America, which was developed by the peculiar nature of their political and social relations, which grew with the increasing spirit of independence and became stronger the more the British Crown and British Ministers attempted to suppress it, and finally culminated in the dissolution of the ties that bound the colonists to Great Britain and brought about independence and nationality. We have already traced these causes from their beginning, so that here nothing more than reference to them is necessary. These causes made the Americans, as a race, at the time of the Revolution, greater individualists than any other people in all the world; the doctrine of individualism had been carried farther than the world before had deemed possible. This belief in individualism was still further strengthened by the adoption of the Constitution, which embodied in precise terms the national belief, and by the political philosophy which taught men to look, not to a central authority to regulate society or ameliorate conditions, but to rely on local authority. The less they depended on authority representative of the power of the people and the more the people had faith in themselves, the more strictly, they believed, they were following the teachings of that philosophy which would lead them to the end which every man sought to reach the ultimate good of all and the happiness of the individual.1

1 "Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride of personal freedom

Virtue pushed to excess can become a vice. Nothing better illustrates this than a study of Americans and their political institutions. Individualism, when America first gave it form and made it a political principle, was a virtue so great that in large measure it changed the whole aspect of political thought, and so enlarged the mind of man that it made possible that great wave of democracy which has overrun the earth, for the world to-day in thought and government is democratic, even though the fiction of kingly rule is maintained. Individualism to-day that is, the political interpretation given to it by Americans has become, if not pre

cisely a vice, in some respects at least a clog to progress; it has, by a false theory that the right of the individual is a right more sacred than the protection of the community, made it possible for the individual to take advantage of his fellow, for laws to be broken or evaded, for development to be hampered. Much that Americans complain of-the unlimited power of wealth, the greed of capital, the corruption of politics, the brutality of the relations between labor and its employer-would be impossible, or at least mitigated, if individualism had not been made an idol.

It has been said that there was a time when the law was slavishly worshiped and that man had to

have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions." Bryce: The American Commonwealth, vol. 11, p.

539.

revolt against the law to gain freedom; and this was the second phase of American psychology traced through the American respect for and indifference to the law. There followed, as always happens after a social convulsion, reaction the third phase. The spiritual exaltation that made men rebels against the law and yet strict observers of what they termed the "rational law"; that made men virtuous and law-abiding because each man believed himself by a sort of divine right to be his own lawmaker, could not last because of the frailty of man and the limitations of his intellect. Law fell into contempt, and the rule of primitive justice took its place. In a long settled and thickly populated country, with society firmly established, where traditions exercise a dominating influence and class divisions set the lawmaker and the law-enforcer apart from the great mass, the law is an established institution to which every man is brought subject from the time of his birth, the great majority of whom will have no more to do with its making and enforcement than with the selection of the head of the church or the appointment of the commanderin-chief; and this aloofness inspires respect because it creates the belief that the science of government is beyond the capacity of the ordinary mind to grasp. Nor must we forget the influence of the feudal system in Europe, which created not only the class of the hereditary lawmaker but the class for whom laws were made.

In the United States the law excites no such veneration, because to the majority there is little if any mystery about its creation. In America its people are not so far removed from the days of the pioneer and the settler as not to recall the time when the only law the community knew was that of the vigilance committee or self-elected judges. When laws are made on the spot to suit an emergency and decisions must be quickly rendered, each man becomes not only lawgiver but executioner, and the law has been robbed of its sanctity. Courts and judges lose their authority; the people believe in their own wisdom and are convinced of their inerrancy. The law is less an institution than an expedient; it is not the foundation of the social structure, but a convenience that may be changed with passing fashion; it is merely the dictum of men who are lawmakers by accident, just as the members of Judge Lynch's court are brought together by chance. This does not necessarily lead to an unethical view of life, but it causes the law and the lawgiver to be held in light esteem. It begins by stripping the law of all its trappings and making it a "practical question"; it ends, curiously enough, by imposing upon it the "nice sharp quillets of the law" and the technicalities of dishonest ingenuity. Before leaving this branch of the subject, let me add that the things now complained of are simply a phase in the evolution of a complex society, and to the observant it is evident that there is again a reaction, but

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it is renitence against the spirit that carried men away from law. There is now to be noticed a pronounced public opinion in favor of respect for the law. The Americans are still profound believers in the cult of the individualistic, but their individualism is becoming tempered with common sense; they see the danger that comes from individualism pushed to extreme limits. The increasing reverence for law is one of the signs that American civilization has outgrown its first stages of unsettled social conditions and is reaching a more permanent state.

Had there been in America a strong central government, the expansion of settlement would have been followed by the expansion of the law; the settler going from the East to the West would have changed his habitation but not his legal code; there would have been the power to enforce law. Side by side on the same continent there have grown up two peoples sprung from the same stock, fundamentally under the same institutions, speaking the same language, as a whole thinking much the same, and whose development, speaking broadly, has been along the same lines. While Canada has adopted the federal system which gives each province control over its local affairs in the same way that the American states are locally sovereign, the power of the Canadian province is much less than that of the American state, and, on the other hand, the central government in Ottawa exercises greater authority than does that in Washington. There is in America,

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