“We certainly riot in the printed word,” said Miss Wiggin.  “Do you know that last year alone to interpret all those statutes and decide the respective rights of our citizens the Supreme Court of this state wrote five thousand eight hundred pages of opinion?”

“Good Lord!” ejaculated Tutt.  “Is that really so?”

“Of course it is!” she answered.

“But who reads the stuff?” demanded the junior partner.  “I don’t!”

“The real lawyers,” replied Miss Wiggin innocently.

“The judges who write them probably read them,” declared Mr. Tutt.  “And the defeated litigants; the successful ones merely read the final paragraphs.”

“But coming back to crime for a moment,” said Miss Wiggin, pouring herself out a second cup of tea; “I had almost forgotten that the criminal law was originally intended only to keep down violence.  That explains a lot of things.  I confess to being one of those who unconsciously assumed that the law is a sort of official Mrs. Grundy.”

“Not at all!  Not at all!” corrected Mr. Tutt.  “The law makes no pretense of being an arbiter of morals.  Even where justice is concerned it expects the mere sentiment of the community to be capable of dealing with trifling offenses.  The laws of etiquette and manners, devised for ‘the purpose of keeping fools at a distance,’ are reasonably adapted to enforcing the dictates of good taste and to dealing with minor offenses against our ideas of propriety.”

“I wonder,” hazarded Miss Wiggin thoughtfully, “if there isn’t some sociological law about crimes, like the law of diminishing returns in physics?”

“The law of what?”

“Why, the law that the greater the force or effort applied to anything,” she explained a little vaguely, “the greater the resistance becomes, until the effort doesn’t accomplish anything; increased speed in a warship, for instance.”

“What’s that got to do with crime?”

“Why, the more statutes you pass and more new crimes you create the harder it becomes to enforce obedience to them, until finally you can’t enforce them at all.”

“That is rather a profound analogy,” observed Mr. Tutt.  “It might well repay study.”

“Miss Wiggin has no corner on analogies,” chirped Tutt.  “Passing statutes creating new crimes is like printing paper money without anything back of it; in the one case there isn’t really any more money than there was before and in the other there isn’t really any more crime either.”

“Only it makes more business for us.”

“I’ve got another idea,” continued Tutt airily, “and that is that crime is a good thing.  Not because it means progress or any bunk like that, but because unless you had a certain amount of crime, and also criminal lawyers to attack the law, the state would never find out the weaknesses in its statutes.  Therefore the more crime there is the more the protective power of the state is built up, just as the fever engendered by vaccine renders the human body immune from smallpox!  Eh, what?”