re is no vision, the people _cast off restraint_." The translator
thus confused an effect with a cause. What was the vision to which the
Wise Man referred? The rest of the proverb, which is rarely quoted,
explains:

"Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint: _but he that
keepeth the law, happy is he_."

The vision, then, is the authority of law, and Solomon's warning is
that to which the great and noble founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn,
many centuries later gave utterance, when he said:

"That government is free to the people under it, where the laws rule and
the people are a party to those laws; and all the rest is tyranny,
oligarchy and confusion."

It is my present purpose to discuss the moral psychology of the present
revolt against the spirit of authority. Too little consideration has
been paid by the legal profession to questions of moral psychology.
These have been left to metaphysicians and ecclesiastics, and yet--to
paraphrase the saying of the Master--"the laws were made for man and not
man for the laws," and if the science of the law ignores the study of
human nature and attempts to conform man to the laws, rather than the
laws to man, then its development is a very partial and imperfect one.

Let me first be sure of my premises. Is there in this day and
generation a spirit of lawlessness greater or different than that that
has always characterized human society? Such spirit of revolt against
authority has always existed, even when the penalty of death was visited
upon nearly all offences against life and property. Blackstone tells us
(Book IV, Chap. I) that in the eighteenth century it was a capital
offence to cut down a cherry tree in an orchard--a drastic penalty which
should increase our admiration for George Washington's courage and
veracity.

We are apt to see the past in a golden haze, which obscures our vision.
Thus, we think of William Penn's "holy experiment" on the banks of the
Delaware as the realization of Sir Thomas More's dream of Utopia; and
yet Pennsylvania was somewhat intemperately called in 1698 "the greatest
refuge for pirates and rogues in America," and Penn himself wrote, about
that time, that he had heard of no place which was "more overrun with
wickedness" than his City of Brotherly Love, where things were so
"openly committed in defiance of law and virtue--facts so foul that I am
forbid by common modesty to relate them."

Conceding that lawlessness is not