Journal of Social Science (Volume 44-46) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906. Excerpt: ... For this culture a study lies at hand which has too often been omitted from our college curricula and relegated to the professional schools. I refer to the general study of law. Manifestly, colleges should not try to train legal practitioners, --their task is not that. Yet I can think of no discipline of the mind more quickening nor of any matter of information more helpfully enlightening than a study, for instance, of the Roman Iaw. The Romans were a people who took the idea of justice seriously, however inadequately they may have conceived it or however imperfectly they may have practised it. An equally inviting and highly rewarding study would be the development of the common law, on which the British ambassador recently addressed the American Bar Association with so great felicity. If it be borne in mind that this study aims at the most intelligent idea of justice rather than at legal training, it will be apparent that other efforts of men to order their relations justly will repay study, --for instance, the rules of the ancient guilds, the more modern rules of the labor organizations, and their correlates, the agreements into which competing firms and corporations have entered to further the attainment of equitable relations between them. The student who analyzes these several systems will find in none of them ideal justice and in none of them an exact reflection of present conditions. But he will have schooled himself in the criticism of the equities of different relations, and will have developed in intelligence his own fundamental sentiment of justice. But how does such a culture constitute a relation to the peace movement? In the most effective way. However it has been in the past, to-day it is the people, not their rulers, who make war. Rulers kno.