As long ago as 1875 Ernst Haeckel, the eminent German scientist, complained that the judges and legislatures of his day and country had “but a superficial acquaintance with that chief and peculiar object of their activity--the human organism and its most important function, the human mind,” and that they had no time for anything save “an exhaustive study of beer and wine and the noble art of fencing.” If that could be said of intellectual Germany in his day how much more and worse could be judicated of the American jurist and legislator in America to-day. The shabby mess which finance and trade rivalries make of our laws and our halls of legislation--the mental equipment of the average politician, his henchmen, the legislator and the judge--the hall boys of finance, and at the same time of religious and therefore arbitrary moral dogma which they have become, the petty ignoramuses we see on every hand legislating for the people or interpreting the laws once they are thus formulated! Haeckel wrote sadly of the judges and law enactors in his day: “No one can maintain that their condition to-day is in harmony with our advanced knowledge of this world”--and, certainly, in America to-day, fifty years later, not a week passes in which we do not read of legislative deeds and legal decisions which make a thinking man sigh. Consider the slavish acceptance of religious and moral and financial dictation from self-interested and equally ignorant people, the running here and there to find what is temporarily expedient--what will satisfy or quiet the public for an hour; what will keep them from losing their petty jobs--by the politicians and legislators and so-called statesmen and judges; the complete ignorance of every congressman and senator and state legislator and judge and lawyer as to the commonest facts of biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and history! One president, Roosevelt, admitted that he could in no way understand economics. Yet once the average country or city law student has mastered a few hundred paragraphs of law he is ready to hire out to the nearest corporation, to legislate for the people, to prefix “Hon.” to his name and set up in business as a judge or a statesman.