If my reader agrees with me in my premises then we are not likely to disagree in the conclusion that the causes of these grave symptoms are not ephemeral or superficial; but must have their origin in some deep-seated and world-wide change in human society.  If there is to be a remedy, we must first diagnose this malady of the human soul.

For example, let us not “lay the flattering unction to our souls” that this spirit is solely the reaction of the great war.

The present weariness and lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the war.  Indeed, it is possible that the world war, far from causing the malaise of the age, was, in itself, but one of its many symptoms.

Undoubtedly, there are many contributing causes which have swollen the turbid tide of this world-wide revolution against the spirit of authority.

Thus, the multiplicity of laws does not tend to develop a law-abiding spirit.  This fact has often been noted.  Thus Napoleon, on the eve of the 18th Brumaire, complained that France, with a thousand folios of law, was a lawless nation.  Unquestionably, the political state suffers in authority by the abuse of legislation, and especially by the appeal to law to curb evils that are best left to individual conscience.

In this age of democracy, the average individual is too apt to recognize two constitutions—­one, the constitution of the State, and the second, an unwritten constitution, to him of higher authority, under which he believes that no law is obligatory which he regards as in excess of the true powers of government.  Of this latter spirit, the widespread violation of the prohibition law is a familiar illustration.

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.