pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present
point of view. We could reconstruct the corpus from them if all that
went before were burned. The use of the earlier reports is mainly
historical, a use about which I shall have something to say before I
have finished.

I wish, if I can, to lay down some first principles for the study of
this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call the law,
for men who want to use it as the instrument of their business to enable
them to prophesy in their turn, and, as bearing upon the study, I wish
to point out an ideal which as yet our law has not attained.

The first thing for a businesslike understanding of the matter is to
understand its limits, and therefore I think it desirable at once
to point out and dispel a confusion between morality and law, which
sometimes rises to the height of conscious theory, and more often and
indeed constantly is making trouble in detail without reaching the point
of consciousness. You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much
reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public
force, and therefore you can see the practical importance of the
distinction between morality and law. A man who cares nothing for an
ethical rule which is believed and practised by his neighbors is likely
nevertheless to care a good deal to avoid being made to pay money, and
will want to keep out of jail if he can.

I take it for granted that no hearer of mine will misinterpret what
I have to say as the language of cynicism. The law is the witness and
external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the
moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of popular
jests, tends to make good citizens and good men. When I emphasize the