ischievous constabulary? If I draw out his tongue shall he (in the
sign-language) demand it back, and failing of restitution (for surely I
should cut it clean away) shall he have the law on me--the naughty law,
instrument of the oppressor? Why? that "goes neare to be fonny!"

Two human beings can not live together in peace without laws--laws
innumerable. Everything that either, in consideration of the other's
wish or welfare, abstains from is inhibited by law, tacit or expressed.
If there were in all the world none but they--if neither had come with
any sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, with
nothing but brains to direct their conduct--every hour would evolve an
understanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. They
would have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrange
their work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. These
arrangements, agreements, understandings--what are they but laws? To
live without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature State
with a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinate
authorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest in
demanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others,
you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for a
flawless example of the iron hand.

Laws of the State are as faulty and as faultily administered as those of
the Family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly "amended,"
many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fall
into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with the
duty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence and
defects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished from
the angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriff
or the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultless
father. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to
devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that
we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The
best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the
disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly
good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows
unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too
imminent peril of braining and eviscerat