One who is generally blamed for offering no practical remedies for the hard cases he provides is not quite so foolish as to think men are to be made into angels by law. Cut-and-dried formulæ are hardly his little gods; and he knows well that far more important than change and reform of laws and systems is improvement in the spirit of the men who administer them. For all that, it is fatal to think that public feeling can be divorced from law in the social organism. In effect these critics say: “It is impossible to diminish cruelty and injustice by law; any attempt to do so will only divert the cruelty or injustice banned to another form of expression.” Very well! It is therefore demonstrably needless and even ridiculous to prohibit, by law, murder, rape, and the deliberate torture of children. The murderer, the ravisher, and the torturer should be allowed to vent their cruelty in these forms, for fear that if they are not so allowed they will vent it in other forms! That is the _reductio ad absurdum_ implicit in all such anarchistic doctrine; and how far it is really held by those who talk of the futility of passing laws against inhumanity one must leave to their own consciences. In any case, the doctrine takes no account of the real nature of laws. In a democratic society, such as ours, only public opinion, or, I would rather say, the true secret consensus of general thought, makes laws possible—I am speaking of laws against inhumanity. And laws so made are but constant reminders to every one that public opinion is against such and such a thing. Laws were made against murder and rape because public feeling against such acts became so strong that, until the laws were made, normal individuals did not rest till they had torn to pieces persons who acted in such abnormal ways. It was therefore considered more convenient that certain recognized professional persons should undertake the work of punishment. And so on through all the gamut of laws down to those against quite minor cruelties, which would not perhaps provoke individual retaliation, but which nevertheless would evoke pity and anger from a majority of those who with their own eyes saw them inflicted. Admitting that the state of public feeling toward a particular form of cruelty must always be more or less a matter of discretionary judgment for legislators, it is yet quite wrong to suppose that laws must wait until the majority of individuals in a community have openly declared a feeling of which perhaps, never having been tested personally, they are not conscious. When one urges the passing of laws to prohibit certain cruelties, one is only urging that the Legislature should give concrete expression to what it believes would be the general opinion of the country, if every man and woman therein could be taken apart—isolated, as juries are—and then actually put face to face with instances of these cruelties, so that they might judge them