something of his rights to the state and the community.
He gave up a certain amount of liberty, but received therefor an
equivalent in protection. The law was, therefore, no oppressor, no
monster, no usurer, no austere being, reaping where it had not sown.
The law was nothing to be dreaded, nothing to be feared; and, upon the
other hand, it was nothing to be scorned.

There must be a beginning, continued Dan Anderson. There must be
something established. The pound measure was one pound, the same all
over the country; a yard measure was a yard, and there was no guesswork
about it. It was the same. It was a unit. So with the law. It must
be the same, a unit, soulless, unfeeling, just, unchangeable. There
was nothing indeterminate in it. The attitude of the law was thus or
so, and not otherwise. It was not for the individual to pass upon any
of these questions. It was for the courts to do so, the approved
machinery set aside, under the social compact, for reducing the
friction of the wheels of society, for securing the permanency of
things beneficial to that society, and for removing things injurious
thereto. The Law itself was immutable. The courts must administer
that Law without malice, without feeling, impersonally, justly.

In so far as there had hitherto been no Law in Heart's Desire, went on
the speaker, thus far had our citizens dwelt in barbarism, had indeed
been unfit, under the very definition of things, to bear the proud
title of citizens of America, the justest, the most order-loving, as
well as the bravest and the most aggressive nation of the world. The
time had now come for the establishment in this community of the Law,
that beneficent agency of progress, that indispensable factor, that
inseparable attendant upon civilization. Upon the sky should blaze no
more the red riot of anarchy and barbarism. Upon the summit of the
noble mountain overtopping this happy valley there should sit no more
the grinning figure of malevolent and unrestrained vice, but the pure
form of the blind Goddess of Justice, holding ever aloft over this
happy land the unfaltering sword and the unwavering scales, so that all
might look thereon, the rightdoers in smiling security, the wrong-doing
in terror of their deeds. This was the Law!

"And now, gentlemen of this jury," said Dan Anderson, "I stand here
before you to make no excuses for this Law, to palliate nothing in the
way of its workings, to set no tentative