frugality. CHAPTER XI THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE Using the figurative words, "the law," in their widest possible sense, to mean the entire system which governs the relations of the individuals in a community with each other and with the community at large, we can easily see that in a century's time many changes of law will have taken place. If it be true that legislative restraints are mostly necessitated by the ill-conceived energies of mankind, and that the right function of the law is to assure to each citizen the largest possible liberty that is consistent with the equal liberty of every other citizen and of all, then it will be right to believe that the great extension of general intelligence, and the equally great extension of general morality, anticipated for the next century, will render many forms of existing restraint obsolete because unnecessary. Regarding offences both against the person and against property as manifestations, for the most part, of unintelligence, we may expect that increased intelligence will lead to a diminution of their number. In applying statistics to an examination of the question whether and to what extent improvements in the general standard of education have in the past diminished crime, and consequently how far crime is likely to be still further diminished in the future, we must be careful to keep in sight two considerations--first, that an increased vigilance and elaboration on the part of authority may easily make it appear that crime has failed to diminish under educational influences, when it is only the detection and punishment of crime that have been rendered more perfect; and second, that if one kind of education have not had all the salutary effects expected of it, it does not follow that a different kind will not have all this expected efficacy and more. Manifestly, legislation against crimes formerly outside the reach of the law--that creation of "new offences" which one hears rather foolishly objected to--will increase statistics of crime, if we compute crime in terms of prison-admissions; and the fact that such increase, due entirely to legislation, has taken place concurrently with some other reform, such as the improvement of education, obviously does not entitle us to connect the increase with the reform. The latter may even be operating in exactly the opposite manner, despite the statistics. A number of new offences were created, for instance, by what is called in England the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and it would be easy for a shocked observer of prison statistics to observe, in a period of years during which the administration of that useful act was being perfected, dreadful increases in the crimes which it represses; whereas the fact probably is that crime of this sort has diminished, largely through the action of the very causes which would make it appear to have been increasing. Therefore, if anyone still argues that education as a means of diminishing crime has