In Europe, where the statutes have grown up from tradition and ancient custom, the law is regarded as a more sacred institution; in a very real sense it is the product of a superior authority. Law in its institutional sense is as much a predetermined factor in daily affairs as is one of the laws of nature. Social and political conditions are fixed. Politics do not enter into the enforcement of law. Civilization is distributed in a more nearly equal measure and the law is enforced with equal vigor over the whole country.[341] The judicial and administrative officers are persons socially and politically distinct from the masses, and their individuality is so completely subordinated to their representative capacity that the law thus comes to have a majesty and dignity which can be given it in no other way. In the United States, on the contrary, the body of the law lacks the support of long tradition and ancient practice. The early immigrants brought with them the European conception of law, but in the midst of new conditions, with no strong government to enforce it with an impartial and an iron hand, along with the growth of the democratic spirit, a new _esprit des lois_, as Montesquieu would call it, has been developed. Where the people, either directly or through their representatives, make the laws and then elect the officers who are to enforce them, it is inevitable that the legal machinery will prove powerless to control popular excitements. Politics also enter very largely into the whole question. In remote districts, too, the people seldom have occasion to meet any other officers of the law than their own neighbors and friends whom they have elected to minor civil offices. It is for this reason that the execution of the law varies so greatly in different parts of the United States, being either vigorous or lax, in accordance with the moral sentiment of the community. In a monarchy or a highly centralized form of government, the law is made for the people and enforced against them by officials who are in no sense responsible to them. In a democracy with a republican form of government, like the United States, such is not the case. The people consider themselves a law unto themselves. They make the laws; therefore they can unmake them. Since they say what a judge can do, they entertain the idea that they may do this thing themselves. To execute a criminal deserving of death is to act merely in their sovereign capacity, temporarily dispensing with their agents, the legal administrators of the law. While not always expressed in language so unmistakable in meaning, yet this is the spirit exhibited, the vague and perhaps unconscious attitude toward the law, which seems particularly to pervade the United States.