feet,"--that higher sort of oratory which is most convincing with an
American audience or an American jury.

The statement of the prosecution, said Dan Anderson, was on the whole a
fair one, and no discredit to the learned brother making it. None
would more readily than himself yield acquiescence to the statement
that law and order must prevail. Without law there could be nothing
but anarchy. Under anarchy progress was at an end. The individual
must give up something of his rights to the state and the community.
He gave up a certain amount of liberty, but received therefor an
equivalent in protection. The law was, therefore, no oppressor, no
monster, no usurer, no austere being, reaping where it had not sown.
The law was nothing to be dreaded, nothing to be feared; and, upon the
other hand, it was nothing to be scorned.

There must be a beginning, continued Dan Anderson. There must be
something established. The pound measure was one pound, the same all
over the country; a yard measure was a yard, and there was no guesswork
about it. It was the same. It was a unit. So with the law. It must
be the same, a unit, soulless, unfeeling, just, unchangeable. There
was nothing indeterminate in it. The attitude of the law was thus or
so, and not otherwise. It was not for the individual to pass upon any
of these questions. It was for the courts to do so, the approved
machinery set aside, under the social compact, for reducing the
friction of the wheels of society, for securing the permanency of
things beneficial to that society, and for removing things injurious
thereto. The Law itself was immutable. The courts must administer
that Law without malice, without feeling, impersonally, justly.

In so far as there had hitherto been no Law in Heart's Desire, went on