The Newtown bee., 1904-05-27
TOWN TOPICS
SOCIAL TOPICS.

There are many good people in this country who to all appearances seem to think that all that is necessary in order to regulate the conduct of SOcie- ty is to get up controlling party in politics and make laws. Whatever the great question on which the peO- pie are naturally divided in their views, social, moral. or simply economic, the impulse is to form new party and get the power of legislation.
 And so we have a prohibition party which proposes to legislate intoxica- ting liquors out of the world; a labor drudgery and make every man rich and happy, and so on through the list. Laws are vainly supposed to cure the moral evils which afflict the world. As though a majority of voters could by any means seriously affect the condi tions of life which are the causes of the evils that are to be cured. And as though nothing could be done in this country without party or purpose to do it!
 We would not make light of legisla- tion, which is good and needful in its place, but laws can do but little at best to change the moral conditions of life. If we would make men temperate we
 
 to better life, as we'll as to restrain them by enforcing the law. If the la boring man is to be lifted up 1t will not be by simply shortening his hours of work, nor by dividing his neighbors' property with him; but by new hopes and higher purposes in living. The man must be changed as we'll as the conditions under which he labOrS. In- deed, change the man and the most essential factor of the labor problem will be changed.
 Confused notions of laws and morals are the causes of much mischief in this good land of liberty. We depend too much upon legislation and not enough on moral incentives and intelligent self-interest. Our children need to be taught by 'precept and example that the moral quality of all our actions must be found in our motives and in- tentions. In one way or another peo- pie come to judge their moral conduct by the civil law-the public statutes rather than by the ten commandments or the Golden Rule. AS it has been said: "They seem to think that these are sufficient rules of conduct for the right guidance of the subjects of the state in their dealings with one an other. They accept them as stand dIOo Ol 0OuAu C1AO 1OC1S uO doubt, that they are entirely righteous if they live up to the requirements of the law which their legislatures and courts have set forth. No idea could be more destructive of true under standing of right and wrong. These laws which our courts enforce not only are not meant to be moral rules, but they could not, by any possibility, have that character or quality given to l them. Nobody can frame directions that will tell us, in every case of our dealing with another, what conduct is called for by the Golden Rule. As a little thought will show us, each case raises a question which the person con. cerned must settle for himself. A man must learn from his own consciousness the line of right conduct which he claims from his neighbOr, in order tC give a true moral aim to his own con. duct toward the one of whom he makes the claim. In no other way car his action be rightly fitted to it's cir. cumstances; in no other way can 1t be a moral act of his own. If his line o1 conduct is simply that which the law lays down, and which it's courts car compel him to follow, it is not his own and therefore, there can be little ol no morality in his obedience to it, nc
 matter how right it may be.
 "Since it is plainly true that not
 would be needed if every man did t( others as he would have them do tt
 him, it follows that most of them art made solely for the coercion of people
 who will not learn for themselve yes
 what is right and do it of their owr accord. It is not the object of the law
 to instruct or guide those who. wish tt
 The best that legislatures and courts can do is to roughly mark lines that shall be somewhat nearly lines of right
 for various classes of dealings betweer people, ,one or both of whom need to bt forced to do what is right. Therefore one who takes guidance from the law is not morally guided at all; he is only kept from going wrong beyond Ger