Gregarious men and women carry within themselves the germs of the possible mob, or of mental epidemics. As social creatures men and women are naturally suggestible. When this susceptibility or sensitivity to suggestions becomes abnormally intense, we may say that they are thrown into a social subconscious, somnambulic state. We know by psychological and psychopathological experiments that limitation of voluntary movements and inhibition of free activities induce a subconscious state. This subconscious state is characterized by inhibition of the will power,--memory remains unaffected; consciousness appears intact; the subject is aware of all that goes on. Keeping this in mind, we can understand social life, and especially morbid, social movements, mob life of all ages. A subconscious state is induced in the organized individual by the great limitation of his voluntary activities and by the inhibition of his free critical thought. Bound fast by the strings of tradition and authority, social men and women are reduced to subconscious automata. The subconscious rises with the growth of organized civilization, while the critical, independent powers of the individual correspondingly fall. Hence the apparent social paradox that the growth of society tends to destroy the mental forces which helped to build up civilization. In such societies the individual staggers under the burden of laws and taboos. Individuality is stifled under the endless massive excretions of legislators. Recently even the lawgivers or law manufacturers began to object to the labor involved in the work on the ever growing mass of bills introduced into the legislature of one state alone. Thus a senator of a Western state complained that in _one_ year over 1700 bills passed through the mill of his Legislature. Multiply that figure by the number of states, add the municipal edicts, and the endless laws turned out by the Federal Government, and one can form some faint idea of the vast burden laid on the shoulders of the individual citizen. The Los Angeles Times, which no one will accuse of radicalism, pointedly remarks: “The State has just issued a reference index to the laws of California since 1850--it is of itself a bulky volume of more than 1300 pages. When it takes a book of that size merely as an _index_ it would seem that the lawmakers had about done their worst.” Over-production of laws is one of the great evils of modern civilization. Civilized society is apt to be obsessed by a state of law-mania which is a danger and a menace to the free development of the individual citizen. The Roman legal thinkers left us two significant sayings: _Ex Senatus consultis et plebiscitis, crimina execrentur_,--(Senatorial decisions and popular decrees give rise to crimes) and: _Ut olim vitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus_,--(As we formerly suffered from vices and crimes so we suffer at present from laws and legislation)....