Statesmen should recognize with Carpenter, that “society is the gigantic growth of centuries, moving on in a resistless and orderly march, with the precision and fatality of an astronomic orb.” The huge being marches on with elephantine tread. The liberal sits on its front and the conservative on its rear; but both are swept along, whether they will or not, and both are shaken off ere long, inevitably, into the dust. One reformer shouts “this way,” and another cries “that,” but down comes the great foot and crushes both, indifferently; the man who thought he was right, and the man who found he was wrong; crushing, alike, him who would facilitate, and him who would impede its progress. At least, it should be kept in mind, “that laws are made by the people, and not the people by the laws.” Modern society is so burdened by an enormous and complex overgrowth of law, that the necessity for its existence is now a prevailing notion, to the end that men may be kept in order: that, without the oppressive institution, people would not follow a systematic life. On the other hand, all observation of civilized races discovers the directly opposite. The instinct of man is to regularity of life, and law is but a result or expression of this. “As well attribute the organization of a crab to the influence of its shell, as ascribe the orderly life of a nation to the action of its laws.” The law may have a purpose, but to believe it will preserve order is illusive. This it certainly does not effect, even with all its machinery of police, courts and prisons. Fichte said: “The object of all government is to render government superfluous.” The same idea has been expressed by Whitman and Paine. Moreover, “if external authority, of any kind, has a final purpose, it must be to establish and consolidate an internal authority. When this process is complete, government, in the ordinary sense, is already rendered superfluous.” The world has been slow (or loath) to learn the only proper functions of government. This must be clear to every reader of Bruce Smith, Lieber and Dick. In the governments of oriental antiquity, political authority was clothed with a super-eminent and absolute jurisdiction over the whole life of its subjects; “the manners of their subjects, their rank, their condition, mode of life, and daily occupations, were all fixed by the law.”