infringed, to submit to such an imposition, not as a law, for it is
none, but on the score of prudence, to escape direr evils. A law is no
fleeting, occasional rule of conduct, suited to meet some passing
emergency or superficial disturbance. The reason of a law lies deep
down, lasting and widespread in the nature of the governed. A law,
then, has these two further attributes of permanence in duration and
amplitude in area. Every law is made for all time, and lives on with
the life of the community for whom it is enacted, for ever, unless it
be either expressly or implicitly repealed. A law in a community is
like a habit in an individual, an accretion to nature, which abides as
part of the natural being, and guides henceforth the course of natural
action. This analogy holds especially of those laws, which are not
enacted all of a sudden--and such are rarely the best laws--but grow
upon the people with gradual growth unmarked, like a habit by the
repetition of acts, in the way of immemorial custom. I have said that
a law is for a community, that it requires amplitude and large area. A
law is not laid down for an individual, except so far as his action is
of importance to the community. The private concerns of one man do not
afford scope and room enough for a law. Neither do the domestic
affairs of one family. A father is not a legislator. A law aims at a
deep, far-reaching, primary good. But the private good of an
individual, and the domestic good of a family, are not primary goods,
inasmuch as the individual and the family are not primary but
subordinate beings: not complete and independent, but dependent and
partial; not wholes but parts. The individual is part of the family,
and the family is part of a higher community. It is only when we are
come to some community which is not part of any higher, that we have
found the being, the good of which is primary good, the aim of law.
Such a community, not being part of any higher community in the same
order, is in its own order a perfect community. Thus, in the temporal