be the result?  If a law forbade the citizens to eat enough to keep themselves alive, it might perhaps be obeyed throughout Monday, but it would be broken by Tuesday morning.  A law which deprived fathers of the care of their own children might just as well be a law which decreed that no children should be born.  A law which decreed that no remedy but the same quack pill should be applied to any disease, whether cholera, appendicitis, or small-pox, would be either disregarded from the beginning, or would soon be repealed by a pestilence.  In short, if any one of these ridiculous laws were enacted, the very voters who voted for it would disregard it as soon as they realised its consequences; and the work which they did as legislators they would tear to pieces as men.  In other words, if we mean, by legislation, legislation which can be permanently obeyed, the legislative sovereignty of democracies, which is so commonly spoken of as supreme, is limited in every direction by another power greater than itself; and this is the double power of nature and of human nature.  Just as all laws relating to the food which men are to eat, and the drugs by which their maladies are to be cured, must depend on the natural qualities of such and such physical substances, so do the constitution and propensities of the concrete human character limit legislation generally, and confine it within certain channels.

This is what “X” and similar thinkers forget; and the nature of their error is very pertinently illustrated by an observation of the English jurist, Lord Coleridge, to which “X” solemnly refers, as corroborating him in his own wisdom.  “The same power,” says Lord Coleridge, “which prescribes rules for the possession of property can of course alter them”; this power being the legislative body of whatever country may be in question.  It is easy to see the manner in which Lord Coleridge reasons.  Because, in any country, the formulation and enforcement of laws have the will of the governing body as the proximate cause which determines them, it seems to Lord Coleridge that, in this contemporary will, the laws thus formulated and enforced have their ultimate cause also.  For example, according to him, the entire institution of property in the State of New York is virtually a fresh creation of the voters from year to year, and has nothing else behind it.  But, in reality, all this business of formulation and enforcement is a secondary process, not a primary process at all.  Lord Coleridge is simply inverting the actual order of things.  Half the existing “rules prescribed as to the possession of property” have, for their ultimate object, the protection of family life, the privacy of the private home, and the provision made by parents for their children.  But family life is not primarily the creation of prescribed rules.  It is the creation of instincts and affections which have developed themselves in the course of ages.  Instead of the law creating family life, it is family