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Footnotes 1183
of the validity of a law. Accordingly, jurors will disregard statutes in perfect good faith,
as in the Sunday-closing prosecutions in Chicago in 1908. In the same spirit a well-
known preacher wrote not long since that a prime cause of lawlessness was enactment of
legislation at variance with the law of nature. In the same spirit a sincere and, as he
believed, a law-abiding labor leader declared in a Labor Day address that he would not
obey mandates of the courts which deprived him of his natural ‘rights.’ In the same
spirit the business man may regard evasion of statutes which interfere with his carrying
on business as he chooses as something entirely legitimate. In the same spirit public
officials in recent addresses have commended administrative violation of tlie legal rights
of certain obnoxious persons, and one of the law officers of the federal government has
publicly approved of mob violence toward such persons.” (Roscoe Pound, Criminal
Justice in the American City—A Nummary [1922], p. 15.)
22 When the young Thoreau, for example, wrote his Civil Disobedience (1849), he
only gave an extreme expression for the common American anti-state attitude: the
citizen must not “resign his conscience to the legislator”; “law never made men a
whit more just.”
“I’he desire to expunge or cure the visible evils of the world is strong. Nowhere
are so many philanthropic and reformatory agencies at work. Zeal outruns discretion,
outruns the possibilities of the case, in not a few of the efforts made, as well by legisla-
tion as by voluntary action, to suppress vice, to prevent intemperance, to purify popular
literature.” (Bryce, of, cit,y Vol. 2, p. 290.)
One example is the establishment of federal income taxation which touches individ-
ual interests directly. It is my opinion that the income tax legislation in America is nearly
as effective as, for example, it is in Great Britain, and more effective than it was in
France, Many of the New Deal measures belong to the same category of fairly success-
ful legislation. The A.A.A. crop restriction and subsidy program as it has been developed
has, on the whole, been carried out successfully (whatever one thinks about its value),
in spite of the fact that it would have been a strong local interest everywhere to connive
in cheating the government.
Pound, Of, cit,y p. 18.
Donald R. Young, American Minority Peofles (1932), p. 224.
Bryce, of, cit,, Vol. 2, p. 371.
Quoted from Guion G. Johnson, of, cit,y p. 93.
Race Questionsy Provincialism and other American Problems (1908), p. III.
Gabriel, of, cit,y p. 418.
Freedom and Culture (1939), p. 55. Dewey is here referring to the theory of
human freedom that was developed in the writings of the philosophers of the Ameri-
can Revolution, particularly in JeflFerson’s writings.
Out of the House of Bondage (1914), pp. 134-13 5.
Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem
^ It is interesting to note that the first books having the term “sociology” in their
titles were almost exclusively concerned with the Negro problem: (i) George Fitzhugh,
Sociology for the South (1854); (2) Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical
and Practical (1854).
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