THE LAWYERS' ATTACK UPON LAW.
/WERE is no stranger symptom at the present moment 1 than the growing indifference to the authority of law which is expressed not merely by Socialists, or by professional agitators whose chief business in life is the attack on bad laws, or even by Irishmeu who, if Mr. Gladstone is to be trusted, regard all laws as foreign inventions for oppressing them, but by gentlemen who have chosen the study and mastery of the law for their official business, like Mr. Bernard Coleridge and Mr. APLaren. Mr. Bernard Coleridge is the son of the Lord Chief Justice. He represents the legal pro- fession not only in his own person, but by virtue of his descent. He site for one of the divisions of a great and energetic borough which, if law ever fell into general discredit, would be hardly habitable ; and yet on Wednesday he ostentatiously led the attack on the authority of the law, and preached the doctrine, if the speech as reported does not misrepresent /WERE is no stranger symptom at the present moment 1 than the growing indifference to the authority of law which is expressed not merely by Socialists, or by professional agitators whose chief business in life is the attack on bad laws, or even by Irishmeu who, if Mr. Gladstone is to be trusted, regard all laws as foreign inventions for oppressing them, but by gentlemen who have chosen the study and mastery of the law for their official business, like Mr. Bernard Coleridge and Mr. APLaren. Mr. Bernard Coleridge is the son of the Lord Chief Justice. He represents the legal pro- fession not only in his own person, but by virtue of his descent. He site for one of the divisions of a great and energetic borough which, if law ever fell into general discredit, would be hardly habitable ; and yet on Wednesday he ostentatiously led the attack on the authority of the law, and preached the doctrine, if the speech as reported does not misrepresent that a law which is not echoed by the opinion of the people at large may properly be ignored. Mr. Bernard Coleridge exhorted the House of Commons to get rid of " legal. cant." Law, "to be operative and respected either in England or Ireland, must be approved by the moral sense of the community at large." That, as we understand it, is an absolute assertion that the law, say, against agrarian murderers ought to be re- pealed in Ireland, so far as it is not " approved by the moral sense of the community at large,"—the evidence that it is not heartily so approved, being that agrarian murderers are shel- tered by the people, and in every way protected against tale police. How far would Mr. Bernard Coleridge go in his effort to find a unit of moral opinion on law? As a Home-ruler of course he will not count on British opinion when estimating She moral validity of a law in Ireland, nor, we suppose,—though we are not sure of this,—English opinion in estimating the moral validity of a law in Scotland or Wales. If this supposition be right, and if Scotch opinion were, as it was once believed to be, indifferent to any formal marriage, Mr. Coleridge would disap- prove, we suppose, any law requiring a formal ceremony, so far as Scotland was concerned ; and if Welsh opinion should follow Irish opinion, as in parts of Wales seems more or less probable, on the agrarian question, he would, of course, in that case, give his sanction to the adoption of a " Plan of Campaign" in Wales. Is this, or anything like this, really his view? If it be so, there is at once an end to the civilising influence of law. Indeed, what this view comes to, is, that so long as any lawless practice can succeed in so captivating any convenient geographical area as to relax the whole tone of political morality in that area, it becomes at once wrong to enforce a law which represents a higher and more stringent view. Mr. Coleridge threw duet into men's eyes by remind- ing the House that when cruel and bloody penalties were exacted for trivial crimes, juries cheated the law by acquitting persons whom they knew to be guilty, in order that they might escape the undue penalty. Well, to our minds, such juries did very wrong, and probably by so doing post- poned for years the abolition of those bloody penalties. But whether they did wrong or right, at least they did not justify the crimes which they refused to punish cruelly ; and the vice of this Irish " Plan of Campaign " is that it justifies, and even enforces the breaking of perfectly fair and right contracts, in order that unfair contracts may be broken through also. To let a criminal escape rather than punish him very cruelly, is one thing ; to break through a voluntary and plain obligation in order to help some one else to break an involuntary and op- pressive obligation, quite another. Mr. Coleridge's doctrine really is that public opinion should supersede law altogether. Public opinion l—a vague entity of which there is no clear test, no authentic register, and for the soundness of which, even when you have got at it, there is no conceivable guarantee. The old teaching used to be that even hard laws, wisely enforced, drilled nations into political might and grandeur. The modern doctrine is that there are to be no hard laws ; or, if there are, they may be lightly disobeyed ; that drill of this kind is totally undesirable,—that public senti- ment is to take the place of law, and that while those who offend the public sentiment should be made to suffer even though they have the law on their side, those who please the public sentiment should be protected from all penalty, how- ever great their transgressions against positive law. This is, indeed, the regime of what Carlyle used to call " rose-water " in its most offensive and dangerous form.
Mr. M'Laren was a little more antinomian than even Mr. Coleridge. He called on the Government to be "thankful" for the breach of the law committed in Ireland in inaugurating the "Plan of Campaign." According to him, the tenant- farmers were discharging a duty in violating any law which prevented them from keeping their wives and children in com- fort. We do not say that Mr. M'Laren would jastify deliberate fraud for the same purpose, but we do not at all know why he should not. If it is right to ignore your plain voluntary obligations in order to keep your wife and children happy, we do not see why it should not be right to break through other and more sacred obligations for the same purpose. Indeed, the principle is so wide a one that it might easily be invoked to justify a treacherous murder for the same end,—the end for which many a murder has actually been committed, though without any thought of its being justifiable. Mr. M'Laren evidently does not understand with what edged tools he is playing. He says, indeed, that the " Plan of Campaign " may very possibly have saved some landlords from death. Well, suppose it did, and how does that justify it ? That means simply that if you can so break the law as to prevent others from breaking a more sacred law, your lawlessness is justifiable. If that were so, every tyrannicide, every murderer who murdered the wicked, every kidnapper of an oppressor, every high-handed wager of private war against those who are to be accounted the enemies of their kind, would be justified. Mr. Coleridge and Mr. M'Laren seem to us to have very little conception indeed of the miserable anarchy of weak amiable sentiments and arbi- trary actions, which their words go to justify. Their doctrine is explicit that in a civilised society you may begin by dis- obeying a law which society in general thinks in need of reform or abolition. Now, a man is always disposed to think that society agrees with him. He knows that a good many share his views. He is not intimately acquainted with those who do not, and he finds it very easy to believe that the majority agree with him. Disobedience, therefore, is justi- able on the easiest terms. And once let private persons begin disobeying the law on their own judgments as to the opinion of the community, and civilisation in the tree sense,—the sense in which it denotes the fitness of mankind for true citizenship, —ceases at once. Arbitrary caprice is enthroned, instead of the rules of life sanctioned by a great historic past, and with the enthronement of such caprice, the very life of moral progress disappears. Mr. Bernard Coleridge and Mr. M'Laren do not do much credit to the majesty of the study in which they ought to be proficients. We had hoped that Law would at least have been justified of her own children.
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