Knowledge is no longer a matter of water-tight compartments. “All good work is one,” says Wells in “Joan and Peter.” Law touches psychology in its treatment of the defective and insane, medicine and surgery in industrial accidents and disease, political science in municipal corporations, economics in taxation, philosophy in its selection of the purposes it should strive to accomplish. And this is a meagre list. The greatest need of American law is the establishment of means for intelligent mutual understanding and effective co-operation, not merely between lawyers and experts in such other fields as those mentioned, but between lawyers and the mass of our population, who fill the jails, pay the taxes, drink city water, get hurt in factories, buy, sell, invest, build homes, and leave it all to their children when they die. For these men and women have a right to complain of our law. Its evils are not those commonly decried, lawyers to defend the guilty, reliance on precedents instead of common sense, bribed judges. The real defect is failure to keep up to date. Many existing legal rules have the same fault as New York surface-cars before the subway or Hoboken Ferries before the tubes. They were good in their day, but it has gone by and they cannot handle the traffic. The system formulated by Story and Kent worked well for the farms, small factories, and small banks of their time, but the great development of national resources and crowded cities presented new situations unsuited to the old legal rules, and kept men too busy for the constructive leisure necessary for thinking out a new system. The law became a hand-to-mouth affair, deciding each isolated problem as it arose, and often deciding it wrong. Yet lawyers were satisfied with law, just as business men with business. Then came the agitation of the last fifteen years, which has at least made us discontented about many things. The next task is to stop calling each other names, sit down together, think matters through to a finish, and work together to complete the process which is farther along than we realize, of making over the common law system of an agricultural population a century ago to meet the needs of the city-dwelling America of to-day.