A race of individualists obey reluctantly, when they obey at all, any laws which they regard as unreasonable or vexatious. Indeed, they are increasingly opposed to any law, which affects their selfish interests. Thus many good women are involuntary smugglers. They deny the authority of the state to impose a tax upon a Paquin gown. The law's delays and laxity in administration breed a spirit of contempt, and too often invite men to take the law into their own hands. These causes are so familiar that their statement is a commonplace. Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with the advance of democratic institutions. Undoubtedly, the excessive emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has contributed to this malady of the age. Men talked, and still talk, loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties. And yet if we were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause. To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the change must, therefore, be of environment. I know of but one such change that is sufficiently widespread and deep-seated to account adequately for this malady of our time.