which we
should like to have, namely, a doing of these things in a fixed,
absolutely predetermined way, excluding all merely individual feelings
or desires of those by whom the ordering and adjustment are carried
out. Thus in these subconscious picturings of the end of law it seems
to be conceived as existing to satisfy a paramount social want of
general security. Certainly the nineteenth-century jurist had this
conception. But is this because the function of law is limited to
satisfaction of that one want, or is it because that want has been
most conspicuous among those which men have sought to satisfy through
law, and because the ordering of human conduct by the force of
politically organized society has been adapted chiefly to satisfying
that one want in the social order of the past?

If we turn to the ideas which have obtained in conscious thinking
about the end of law, we may recognize three which have held the
ground successively in legal history and a fourth which is beginning
to assert itself. The first and simplest idea is that law exists in
order to keep the peace in a given society; to keep the peace at all
events and at any price. This is the conception of what may be called
the stage of primitive law. It puts satisfaction of the social want of
general security, stated in its lowest terms, as the purpose of the
legal order. So far as the law goes, other individual or social wants
are ignored or are sacrificed to this one. Accordingly the law is made
up of tariffs of exact compositions for every detailed injury instead
of principles of exact reparation, of devices to induce or coerce
submission of controversies to adjudication instead of sanctions, of
regulation of self-help and self-redress instead of a general
prohibition thereof, and of mechanical modes of trial which at any
rate do not admit of argument instead of rational modes of trial
involving debate and hence dispute and so tending to defeat the
purpose of the legal order. In a society organized on the basis of
kinship, in which the greater number of social wants were taken care
of by the kin-organizations, there are two sources of friction: the
clash of kin-interests, leading to controversies of one kindred with
another, and the kinless man, for whom no kin-organization is
responsible, who also has no kin-organization to stand behind him in
asserting his claims. Peace between kindreds and peace between
clansmen and the growing mass of non-gentile