sacrifice. It is this kind of practical idealism that is represented in the history of our country, a deep faith in spiritual things, tempered by a hard common sense adapted to the needs of this world. It has been illustrated in the character of the men who planted colonies in the wilderness and raised up States around the church and the schoolhouse; who bought their independence with their blood and cast out slavery by the sacrifice of their bravest sons; who offered their lives to give more freedom to oppressed peoples; and who went to the rescue of Europe with their treasure and their men when their own liberty and the liberty of the world was in peril, but when the victory was secure, retired from the field unencumbered by spoils, independent, unattached and unbought. Such has been the moral purpose that has marked the conduct of our country up to the present hour. The American People have never adopted and are not likely to adopt any other course.'

Combine these three utterances, as set forth, the theory by Kipling, the principle by Hughes and the application by Coolidge, and you have the Monroe Doctrine, the American principle, unchanged and unchangeable by any President, any Congress, or any Court, for the simple reason that it is implanted in the will of the American people, who alone in the United States possess sovereign powers.

TOL. CCXX.-No. 824

LAW AND THE CHANGING ORDER

BY MARVIN B. ROSENBERRY

Justice of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin

MANY persons are profoundly disturbed by the development which our law has undergone during the period since the Civil War. It is practically impossible for any citizen, unless he be a lawyer, to find the law, and even a lawyer is quite likely to go astray in any field except the one in which he specializes. Not only have legislative enactments been multiplied beyond all precedent, but numerous regulatory bodies have been created with vast powers-partly administrative, partly executive, and at least quasi-judicial. The law has many sources. The lines which separate one field of law and governmental activities from another are dim and wavering. Individual liberty, including the right of free contract, has been greatly limited and circumscribed. Many changes have taken place in the legal order, the significance of which is little understood by those who have not made a special study of the subject. On the one hand there are those who would preserve our law as it existed fifty years ago without change; and on the other hand, there are those who would greatly impair, if not completely destroy, our constitutional system.

Let us consider some of the reasons for these changes. As a basis of discussion and for the purpose of illustration, let us contrast very briefly a cross-section of American life as it was developed a hundred years ago in the Middle West, with a cross-section of the life of the same section of today. It is only within the last decade that we have passed from a nation predominantly rural to one predominantly urban. If we examine an average home of a hundred years ago, we shall find that all of the simpler processes of manufacture were carried on within that home. Baking, canning, preserving, weaving, spinning, dressmaking, making of ordinary clothing, and many other simple manufacturing processes done within its four walls. Upon the farm were produced

all the principal articles of food and it supplied most of the raw materials used in manufacturing. The slaughtering of animals, the preservation of meats, the making of tools of the simpler sort, were understood and practiced upon every farm. The family was an economic as well as a social unit. Every member of the family had a distinct responsibility for its success, for upon that depended the supply of food, clothing and comforts of life for each member. This made for family solidarity, for a unity of family interest, for the upbuilding and maintenance of strong family ties. The home was the center of instruction. The family altar was a reality, not a myth. People lived out of doors more than in the house, and dealt constantly with the irresistible forces of nature. Each family was surrounded by other units whose interests were of the same sort. Between these units there existed a community of interest which rested upon a common experience, common desires and common ambitions. The family was but little dependent upon the adjacent village, though there were to be found the grist mill, the blacksmith shop, the wagon shop, the shoemaker's shop, the tannery and the woolen mill. These institutions, together with the local store through which came the silks, spices and other luxuries and semi-luxuries from the outside world, supplied all the needs of the community, and upon that simple basis society had been organized for hundreds of years. Dynasties might rise and fall, governments might come and go, but life flowed on in a steady, almost unvarying stream. Traditions, both family and national, were strong. The sense of personal rights and political responsibility were keen, sharpened as they were by the action and reaction of the frontier. There were great families who occupied in some respects at least the position of feudal lords, but they were few and far between and their aims, sympathies, purposes and ambitions conformed very largely to those of the entire group. It was for a society such as this that our Federal Constitution and earlier State Constitutions were framed.

Let us observe what has happened to this social structure in the last hundred years with the introduction of improvements in transportation and the coming of the so-called industrial age. One after another the simple manufacturing processes have been

taken out of the home and out of the small community, and concentrated in large units, mainly in great centres of population. Even the farmer of today depends for his flour upon the great milling centres of the country. Shoes are made not by the village shoemaker, but in specialized manufacturing plants where forty or fifty or even a hundred people may work upon a single pair of shoes. Canning, preserving and baking have been taken from the home and are in the hands of large operators with hundreds and often thousands of employes. Not only have spinning and weaving long since left the home for the factory, but nearly every thing we use is made ready to wear or serve, involving a still greater extension of the factory system. The village blacksmith shop and wagon shop have become the automobile industry, upon which the country spends annually a sum equal to the national debt at the close of the Civil War. The local store still struggles for existence in competition with chain stores and the catalogue houses. The ancient stage coach has given way to the modern railway train. Great organizations of employes have sprung up able to enforce their demands. The pressure for standardization and mass production is so great that Mr. Arthur Pound finds it difficult to say who is master-man or machine.

This change in our national life has come upon us with overpowering swiftness. Some indication of the rate of change is indicated by the fact that more iron and steel have been produced and used since 1900 than in all the previous history of the world. In the Middle West it has come with perhaps the greatest speed. We have passed within the span of a single life from a frontier agricultural community to a complex industrial society. The dominant note of the life of our day is struck not upon the farm, but in the city.

Let us examine a little more minutely what has happened to the family unit with the taking of all of these processes out of the home and rural community and into the factories. First of all, we must note that with the processes there have gone the members of the family who formerly did the work in the home, to do that work in the factory to which it has been transferred. As a consequence, the home no longer functions as it did a hundred years ago. One member of the family goes to work in one field of effort

and another in a different field. There is therefore much less family solidarity. Diversity of occupation makes for diversity of interest. Family ties and restraints are much weakened. The shift from the home to the factory has resulted in the creation of a new set of human problems. These relate to education, social welfare in all its manifold aspects, the creation of character building agencies to supplement the home, the promotion of public health, and like matters.

With the increase of population and the increasing use of machinery, there has developed a change in the nature of our problems. Consider a single illustration. Under the conditions of a hundred years ago, the earnings of the family were received and distributed by the head of the family. While the earnings were the product of their joint effort, the family was so far a unit that its earnings belonged legally to and were in fact actually received and distributed by its head. If others not members were employed, all obligation to them was discharged when they left and their wage was paid. Those who were permanently members of the family expected ultimately to share the accumulations of the group through inheritance or by devise. The home is no longer, except in a very limited sense, a producing unit. It has become instead a disbursing unit. The processes of production are carried on elsewhere. The earnings of the individual members of the family are brought to the home and they are there disbursed. Consequently the division of the proceeds of productive effort no longer rests with the head of the family, but with the management of the corporations which carry on the productive enterprises in which the members of the family are engaged. The struggle for a just distribution of these funds has created the wage question, which in its larger aspects is often denominated the struggle between labor and capital. This change or shift has created an entirely new set of relationships as to which there was no standard or tradition, and the consequent necessity for regulatory legislation of many kinds and sorts. The new relationships are in many particulars analogous to the old, but they are not the same. Under the old system, when a member of the family was injured, the duty of caring for him devolved upon the family and it was done at the expense of the family. At