providing for observance of Sunday after the Puritan manner. The community approves and supports the statute; it is enforced without disheartening difficulties. Decades elapse; cosmopolitan cities grow up; heavy immigration from Teutonic, Latin, and Slavic countries changes the character of the citizenship; tens of thousands of "naturalized" Americans, and their sons and daughters, have a totally different conception of Sunday observance. They are respectable and virtuous citizens, but they systematically ignore or break a law which "does not appeal to them. What happens? Local officials, in spite of an oath to enforce all laws, suspend the Sunday law; the press is silent or even sympathetic; when prosecutions are attempted, juries disagree or acquit the offenders, for juries reflect the average character and intelligence of a community; elections, votes, platforms sanction the disregard of the law. A theory develops that in the cities so circumstanced custom and practice have altered the law. The theory, legally speaking, is unsound, but not even decisions of the highest court of the state affect the practical situation. The proper thing for the legislature to do is to take cognizance of the actual conditions and in the interest of law itself grant "local option" to cities in the matter of Sunday observance. But this is not done, for in the legislature are many representatives from small towns and rural sections in which the conditions are different. The Sunday law remains on the statutebook, but in the large cities it is a dead letter. Respect for law is weakened in consequence.

Turning to another type or kind of regulation, take municipal ordinances prohibiting the littering of streets or expectoration on sidewalks. Such ordinances are clearly desirable; educated and refined men and women favor them and respect them; indeed, it is at the instance and demand of such elements that city councils enact such "health" ordinances. Newspapers and clubs commend them, and what more can we wish?

A good deal more. We forget that there are tens of thousands of citizens or residents in every large city who, in the striking words of a Slavic immigrant leader, live underneath America, not in America. What are health ordinances to the foreign "colonies," to the recent arrivals, to the tenement-house population? These,

and many others, do not belong to civic clubs, do not read magazine and newspaper editorials, do not know, even, that the ordinances exist. If they learn of the existence of the ordinances, they stare, wonder, and quickly dismiss them from their minds. Nothing in their lives, habits, associations, experiences has prepared them to realize the significance of such measures. They move in different worlds.

What is the result? In whole sections and districts the ordinances are habitually violated, consciously and unconsciously. A few sporadic arrests and spasmodic "crusades" remind us of the existence of the ordinances-on paper. Such occasional "enforcement" merely emphasizes the farcical nature of the proceedings. Yet how irrelevant and superficial it is to exclaim, à propos of such farcical proceedings, "How lawless Americans are as a nation!" The blunder is in enacting laws and ordinances which "have no chance," which are foredoomed by the nature of the medium and the conditions in which they must vainly struggle for slight and partial recognition. If, however, we deliberately elect to enact laws demanded, understood, and appreciated by a small part of the community, knowing full well that they cannot and will not be generally enforced, then we should not affect astonishment or disgust when the foreseen and expected comes to pass.

A far more serious breakdown of law and justice in the United States has taken place with reference to the Negro population. We lynch and burn black men suspected of crime; we have witnessed race riots in which innocent Negroes were attacked and brutally hunted because of actual or fancied wrongdoing on the part of a few black miscreants; we have witnessed grave miscarriages of justice in the courts owing to the antipathy of juries toward the Negro; we acquiesce in wholesale disfranchisement of black citizens under unfair and discriminatory state laws. These phenomena are deplorable, and it is the duty of every right-thinking American to protest against them and come to the defense of the Negro. At the same time, it is not illegitimate to ask whether, in the same circumstances, any other people would give a better account of itself and show more self-restraint, less prejudice, more humanity. Only half a century ago the Negroes were slaves. They had no legal rights

which white men were bound to respect. They were bought and sold as merchandise. Their emancipation came, not as the product of moral and economic evolution, but as the by-product of a bitter and terrible war over the issue of secession. Enfranchisement was logical and natural as a sequel to emancipation. But the white population of the South, while it acknowledged defeat, was not reconciled to complete emancipation. Reconstruction carried abuses with it and coercion of the South could not be continued indefinitely. The reaction which followed the restoration of autonomy in the South was the work of factors which legislation and judicial decisions could not and did not prevent. The Negro problem is one of extreme complexity and difficulty, and only time and education can solve it. Would any other nation have solved it in fifty years? No one will answer the question in the affirmative in the light of the relations between the British and the natives of India and of Egypt.

But is it necessary to go to India for a parallel? A more striking and convincing illustration is afforded by the Anglo-Irish question. There is more like-mindedness in the United Kingdom than there is in the United States. Still, Ireland is not merely "John Bull's other Island"; it is not a group of British counties. The laws of the Parliament of the United Kingdom have not been welcomed in Ireland. Fenianism, dynamite, boycotting, rent-strikes, cattledriving, obstruction-these have been the means of Irish resistance to British rule. Coercion, severe repression, extraordinary measures of legislation and administration were tried, abandoned, tried again, and abandoned again. What has brought peace and a régime of law to Ireland? Radical legislation suited to her needs. Reduction of rents, government interference, land purchase, state aid have pacified Ireland, and Home Rule will sooner or later complete the process. The laws which were not and could not be enforced have been modified, repealed, superseded. The laws which are being enforced in Ireland are enforceable in their nature, for the needs and sentiments of the people are back of them and under them.

So much for the cause of apparent lawlessness found in a heterogeneous population, in a Babel of tongues, beliefs, traditions, stand

ards, intellectual and emotional characteristics. To come now to another potent cause of "lawlessness"-the structure and form of our government.

Federalism is distinctly an experiment—at least on the colossal American scale. A union of "sovereign" states has great and splendid advantages. Our states are wonderful social and political laboratories. We are free to "try out" reforms and measures. We have ultra-conservative, moderate, progressive, and ultraradical states. Oregon proudly claims to have adopted a completely democratic form of government. Wisconsin boasts of model corporation laws. Commission government, the referendum, the initiative, the recall, income taxation, direct nomination-these and a hundred other modern schemes and devices are being tested before our eyes. The most stubborn conservative cannot fail to profit by these experiments. In so far as machinery, method, form of government are concerned our dual system is calculated to promote progress.

But there is a less attractive side of the picture. In the field of morals state rights and state freedom yield evils as well as benefits. So true is this, and so widely is it realized, that the demand for uniform legislation (either imposed by the federal government or else secured by agreement among the states) is now almost an imperative command of the national conscience. What does "law" mean to the divorce colony of Reno? What does it mean to men and women who marry in one state, obtain a divorce in another, and form new alliances in a third? What does it mean to thousands of superficial observers of such "legal" mockeries?

Nay, the case as regards marriage and divorce legislation is even worse than it is commonly pictured by advocates of a uniform divorce law. Even the loose, crude, incongruous laws of the most "liberal" states, the states which practically advertise for patronage of divorce colonies, are cynically disregarded. As many judges and lawyers have repeatedly stated, perjury, collusion, fraud, and hollow pretense are alarmingly prevalent in the sphere of divorce litigation. The courts are not blind, but they can do little to discourage lying and false swearing. For instance, there is the "residence" provision. In the "free and easy" states even the law

demands of petitioners for divorce a certain minimum period of residence. It does not, in terms, discriminate between those who have actually made the state their home, and those who have not the slightest intention of remaining in the state one day longer than is necessary under the letter of the law. To grant divorces to persons who acquire a legal domicile for the sole purpose of qualifying for divorce is, of course, to outrage common-sense. Yet, without uniformity in legislation having vital relation to morals, such absurdities are hardly avoidable. What is bad and vicious in the situation is the advantage taken of weak state laws by citizens of other states; and the temptations, the opportunities, the incitements to such conduct are the result of misapplied federalism. Flesh is weak at the best, and crime or immorality is largely prevented by removal of temptation and opportunity. Where laws can be lightly and cavalierly treated, depend upon it, many will so treat them.

The weakness and danger of federalism from a moral point of view are illustrated constantly in another sphere-that of corporate industry and corporate finance. We have heard and read a good deal about the sturdy honesty and integrity of British merchants. The standards of American men of business are not naturally lower than those of their English brethren. But our chaotic corporation laws put a premium on deception and fraud. What one state will not do for corporations another will; there is apparently nothing some states will not authorize corporations to do for the sake of fees and annual taxes. Men incorporate in Maine or New Jersey to do business in Wisconsin or Minnesota. They seek states where "no questions" are asked regarding their capital, assets, purposes, and methods. They want charters which license them to make money by hook or crook. Now, "guilt is personal," but the primary offenders in cases of corporate chicane and plunder are the lawmakers who enact corporation laws which beget and breed dishonesty. What a country like Great Britain or France can do for business morality in a month, by enacting one national reform measure dictated by experience, would require years or decades in the United States, owing to our "sovereign states" and their place in the American governmental system.

What is true of corporation law is true of railroad legislation, of