theft was almost the only crime recognized and when wholesale murder was a virtue. Every age had its own standards, and it would be absurd to argue that an act was wrong if it received the sanction of the whole community. It was the communal conscience that determined all problems of right or wrong, and it is still the communal conscience that gives us our definitions of morality and honesty. Here, in my opinion, is where a great part of our trouble arises. The communal conscience has changed, and some things regarded right and proper twenty years ago are frowned upon to-day. But business methods tend to become rigid and inelastic, and a sudden evolution of the public conscience leaves them in the rear. Then comes a sudden recognition of the disparity, and laws are passed to prevent the practices that formerly went unchallenged. Usually these laws are passed in a hurry and by politicians who have no clear grasp of the problem. As a result the laws are ineffective. That is to say, business, clinging conservatively to its familiar ways, finds a plan to continue those ways in spite of the laws passed to prevent them and then public opinion, finding no relief, is angered,—not at the breaking of a law, but because the law itself was ill-designed and ineffective. In other words, public opinion has failed in its effort to force the individual to set aside his own interests for what public opinion considers to be the interests of the community. Public opinion in this country is not a steady and persisting force, as it is in some older communities. It moves spasmodically and after long periods of quiescence and usually under some stress of excitement, which prevents deliberation and therefore effectiveness. Law being more unwieldy than conditions, naturally lags behind them, and what we have to recognize is a change in conditions and in laws and not an outbreak of lawlessness. Another evil result from the impetuous way in which we make laws is that they are not enforced because they are not in harmony with the views of the community. The statute books of every State are encumbered with laws passed in moments of hysteria and never put into operation, or else allowed to lapse

after a few months of confusion. Every newspaper in California, for example, breaks the law every day when it prints a news item without appending the name of the writer, and probably we are all of us breaking laws of which we never heard. This sort of thing brings a law into contempt and robs it of the sacredness that should attach to it. The Sherman anti-trust law, for example, would bring the whole business of the country to a standstill if it were strictly enforced, and I believe it is not good to bring large and innocent sections of the community within the scope of a criminal law simply for the purpose of reaching a minute proportion whose methods are flagrantly bad. If the Sherman anti-trust law were enforced, it would have to be repealed at once, and I think honest traders have a right to complain of a law that makes them technical criminals and is enforced only against notorious wrongdoers. The law should be so framed as to reach only wrongdoers and to leave honest traders outside of even its technical scope.

President Roosevelt was emphatic in his declaration that he intended to enforce the Sherman anti-trust act, and during the four years beginning with 1902 his administration was active in that direction.

In 1906 he stated: “Combinations of capital, like combinations of labor, are a necessary element in our present industrial system. It is not possible completely to prevent them; and, if it were possible, such complete prevention would do damage to the body politic. It is unfortunate that our present laws should forbid all combinations, instead of sharply discriminating between those combinations which do good and those combinations which do evil.

It is a public evil to have on the statute-books a law incapable of full enforcement, because both