AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION. 
PAW AS AN ELEMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: 
A 
PAPE R 
READ AT THE 
FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING, 
BOSTON, OCTOBER 14th, 18(38, 
BY 
HON. EMORY WASHBURN, LL.D., 
PROFESSOR OF LAW IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
BOSTON: 
1868. 
J. H. EASTBURN’S PRESS. AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION. 
LAW AS AN ELEMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: 
A 
PAPER 
READ AT THE 
FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING, 
BOSTON, OCTOBER 14th, 1868, 
HON. EMOHY WASHBURN, LL.D., 
PROFESSOR OF LAW IX HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
BY 
BOSTON: 
1868. 
J. H. EASTBURN’S PRESS. LAW AS AN ELEMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
The subject upon which I am now to tax your indulgence, is 
that of Law as an Element of Social Science, and the rela- 
tions which it holds to that science as a broad and comprehensive 
system of public economy and wise beneficence. Nor can I hope to 
claim your attention without showing, as I shall attempt to do, the 
practical application of the subject to interests which are personal to 
us all, as members of the family, the neighborhood and the State. 
In order to do this however, it is necessary to understand what is 
meant by Law as well as what is embraced under the term Social 
Science, that the propositions, with which I am to deal, may be 
the more readily intelligible. 
In popular phrase, Law is, itself, a Science, made up of technical 
rules which supply the forms and processes by which private controver- 
sies are determined, and the peace of a community is maintained. For 
this purpose it has its tribunals of justice and its officers by whom it is 
administered between the citizen and the State, and one citizen and 
another. These outward forms by which law manifests itself, supply 
the conception which most men entertain of its properties and its 
functions ; and it is only by study and reflection, that the mind is able 
to comprehend how essentially it enters into the organization of 
Society itself. To understand its true relations, we must not content 
ourselves with what meets the eye of a casual observer — the 
machinery by which it works out its problems, and the agencies 
by which it enforces its judgments. Judges and lawyers and courts 
of justice are but the outward representatives of a principle whose 
subtle agency reaches the conduct, and influences the thoughts and 
opinions of every intelligent being, and at the same time inspires that 4 
ceaseless guardianship that watches over the minutest' interests of the 
homeless stranger and the helpless infant. It is a principle which 
binds society together by an inseparable bond, while it penetrates 
into all its relations and takes care of all its interests. When there- 
fore I come to speak of law in its less obvious connexions, I hope 
to show, by a reference to the illustrations of common life, how much 
society owes to it for its domestic peace, and the harmony with which 
its affairs move on in spite of all the elements of discord which 
are abroad in the world. 
If I attempt at the same time to define what is meant by Social 
Science, of which law is assumed to form a constituent element, 
the difficulty which meets me is in its breadth and extent, which 
renders it impossible to reduce it to any one form of expression. 
Writers have attempted to define it by telling us in what it consists. 
We are told that “ Moral Duties, Exchanges and Laws are the three 
subjects of Social Science,” and that “ Ethics, Politics, Economy 
and Jurisprudence ” form its three sub-divisions, (Heron 5.) But 
the terms used to limit and define the meaning of the principal term, 
are in themselves necessarily so vague as to require in turn to be 
limited and defined, in order to give any thing like the exactness 
which is implied in the term — Science,. Nor do I know any better 
mode of doing this, than by quoting .the language of the National 
Association of Great Britain, from which our own is borrowed. 
Its objects as stated in the report of its transactions, are these : “The 
Association is established to aid the development of Social Science, 
to spread a knowledge of the principles of jurisprudence and to guide 
the public mind to the best practical means of promoting the advance- 
ment of education, the prevention and suppression of crime, the refor- 
mation of criminals, the adoption of sanitary regulations, and the 
diffusion of sound principles on all questions of social economy, trade 
and international law,” “ And to afford a common ground for the 
interchange of trustworthy information upon the great social problems 
of the day.” I shall not, therefore, attempt to separate or classify the 
parts of a Science whose field is so broad, and whose mission it is to 
improve the condition, and advance the prosperity of Society in every 
form, whether it be the household or the State. Whatever tends to do this may be regarded as an element of a system which has been 
said, with propriety, “ to be of no country,” and to “ belong to 
the entire world.” 
Regarded in this light, Jurisprudence becomes not only an essential 
element of Social Science, but lies at the foundation of all Social life. 
It is to Society what that subtle principle, the vis vitce is in man as a 
living organism, without which the material parts of the human frame 
would be as useless as the broken pipes of the organ, through 
which no harmony can be breathed and no sound given back to 
the touch of the player. 
But here again it is necessary to define further what that some- 
thing is, which we call Law. It is not necessarily embodied into 
a code, or a system of written rides. No matter how perfect or com- 
plete may be the work of the law giver, every State has its laws 
which are yet to be written. There is a principle of growth and 
development in the thoughts and opinions which prevail in bodies 
politic, and which enter into and form the basis of their laws, which 
keeps pace with the changes in its condition and the wants of the 
people of which they are composed, whether these arise in the 
progress of business, social order or civilization. And these are often, 
practically, greatly in advance of what has already been enunciated as 
laws, by those who make or declare what are the received doctrines 
of a nation’s jurisprudence. We are accustomed to associate with 
law the expression of some mandate, or the formal declaration of the 
will of a sovereign or governing power in the State, and to ascribe its 
principal force and obligation to the sanctions with which it is clothed 
by the government, from which it emanates. But the principal of 
obedience to law lies altogether deeper than the penalties which civil 
government imposes for its violation. We unconsciously or implicitly 
obey the same idea of regulation, a restraint which enters into the best 
code that human skill ever devised. And this is true in respect to mat- 
ters over which no recognized tribunal has jurisdiction or control. Not 
only is it true as illustrated in history, but it is true in the com- 
mon every day affairs of life, and in things, too, which, at first sight, 
have hardly the semblance of coming under the cognizance of 
civil government. Nothing is too high or too low to be out of the 6 
pale of the law. At no time, for instance, in the history of 
the English Crown, has its prerogative been so absolute as dur- 
ing the reign of Henry VIII. He affected despotic power, and 
among the language addressed by him to his Arch Bishop in 
connexion with his purpose of sacrificing his lawful Queen to 
the indulgence of an unlawful passion, he uses this, as we find it 
quoted in Froude, “ Albeit, we being your King and Sovereign, 
do recognize no superior on earth but only God, and not being 
subject to the laws of any earthly creation.” . And yet he was 
compassing heaven and earth, at that very moment, to find some way 
to be freed from the irksome restraints of the very law that he affected 
to despise, and only succeeded at last by a revolutionary act of 
counter legislation. But we need not go such a distance either, in 
time or place, to find illustrations of the universality of that 
instinct which answers, in private life, to the binding obligations 
of law in the broader civil relations of the State. We see men acting 
upon it whenever they come together, whether it be for business 
or for pleasure. And true to the same instinct, the sports of childhood 
are regulated by rules which no one thinks of disobeying. The play 
ground is a miniature republic with its laws and its sanctions, which 
are none the less binding that they are written in no statute book. 
It seems to be a necessity of our natures, qnd half a dozen men cast 
by shipwreck upon a desert island, could not tolerate this forced 
association for a day, without a mutual recognition of the right of 
each other, and a protection of the weak from the aggressions of the 
strong. And in their eagerness to reach justice, people at times 
are too impatient to wait for its due course of administration, but 
by their rashness make martyrs of their victims, instead of suffering 
their example to be a solemn testimony, that tho’ “ the mill of the 
Gods grinds slow,” it never fails to do its work. Sometimes this idea 
of the obligation of law manifests itself in voluntary agreement, defining 
what duties one owes to another. In other circumstances, custom 
gives the rule, and fashion becomes'the arbiter of what one is content 
to observe. Every business partnership has its code of rules for the 
regulation of its domestic concerns; and every well regulated family 
has its laws to which its members are taught to submit. The thousand and one corporations in the Commonwealth have each its by-laws, and 
trade builds up its own customs, to which the courts themselves defer 
in settling the controversies which grow up in business communities. 
Nor am I in these illustrations, transcending the province of law 
as defined by writers upon what is embraced within its proper scope. 
Blackstone defines law as “a rule of action dictated by some 
superior being,” which he applies to “ human action and conduct.” 
But there may be what he calls “ a prescribed rule of civil conduct,” 
answering to this idea of law, without its having been first pro- 
mulgated by a formal declaration or decree of a sovereign law giver. 
Nine-tenths of the laws of England come within what is called 
the common law, and never had a place upon her statute book. It 
was originally unwritten — the growth and product of a common 
experience on the part of the people of what their circumstances and 
condition required, — a law made by the people for themselves, 
and promulgated by the constituted expounders of what the common 
law is. So it is in our own country. The rights of person and 
property, the forms of business, the remedies for wrongs, and the 
changing of hands of millions of dollars every year are regulated by 
known and well defined rules, not one of which have any other basis 
than as being a part of the unwritten law of the land. And yet, as 
the will and prevailing sentiment of a people, it is no forced construc- 
tion to say that these laws were and are “ dictated by a superior 
being,” — the people themselves — the ultimate source of sovereignty 
and power in every State. 
A rule is none the less a law because we cannot trace it directly to 
the action of a superior power. Many a dogma receives implicit 
obedience, whose chief claim to such observance rests upon the 
common consent of those who obey it. Nor is it essential that it 
should carry with it pecuniary loss or personal suffering for its 
violation. There are more potent sanctions than these against a 
breach of Social law. There is the less easily tolerated sting of 
wounded pride; mortified self-love, and the loss of social caste; 
or, what is more fearful still, the world’s dread laugh which, upon 
sensitive minds, carries with it more instinctive terror than any 
apprehension of personal loss or harm. Many a brave man who has 8 
marched up to the cannon’s mouth with an unfaltering step, lias quailed 
before the array of a dinner table, or the gay dresses of a drawing room, 
and cowed before the sneer of the brainless fop who held, for the mo- 
ment, the arbitrament of fashion. We do a thousand things because we 
are afraid to go counter to the laws which fashion has prescribed, and 
play the fool at times rather than risk the consequence of sinning against 
etiquette. Men even meet each other in deadly conflict, in open 
violation of the law of the State, because as gentlemen they find 
themselves amenable to a higher code of honor. There is a homely 
adage that “ one may as well be out of the world as out of the 
fashion.” And we witness the force of this in the remarkable freaks 
which fashion plays with dress and style, and the outward observances 
of what is called society. A fashionable lady passes through as many, 
and almost as frequent changes in the magnitude of her expanse 
in dress, the length of her skirts, and the palpable or impalpable form 
and structure of her bonnet, as the moon in its orbit from the slim 
crescent to the gibbous rotundity of a full sized orb. And for each 
of these there is a sanction, in the dread of being singular, more 
potent than that by which civil law is ordinarily enforced or its 
violation punished. Nor need we be at a loss to account for this, when 
we remember the universal tendency there is in men to be influenced 
by the will and opinions of others around them. We can hardly 
measure the power of a single well defined thought. No matter how 
it originates, when a thought once gets possession of the mind, whether 
it is that of the individual or the public, it has, for the time being, 
a power over the conduct of the individual and the policy of the State, 
as imperative as a decree emanating from sovereignty itself. 
The thought that away beyond the limits, where the sun goes down, 
there lay hid a continent which might be laid open to the human gaze, 
was as effectual to urge on Columbus to encounter the perils of 
an untried ocean, as if it had been a sentence of banishment that sent 
him on his trackless way beyond the limits of human discovery. The 
mad thought of redeeming the holy sepulchre from the profane foot 
of the infidel, had been working in the heart and brain of Europe 
before the voice of Peter the Iiermit had been raised in the first 
crusade; and it held a controlling influence over the policy of her 9 
nation’s, long after the fanaticism of the hour had been quenched 
in the overthrow of the first of the wild schemes which he inaugurated. 
Wliile on the one hand, thought, whether of the public or the 
individual, may grow in depth and expansion, till it gains the force of 
law; on the other, Law, when it has once been promulgated and 
established by the representative power in a State, becomes itself 
a source and element of a people’s thought, giving to it a strength and 
consistency which come from its being a part of the traditional respect 
for authority, in which the men of every State are educated. 
There is, however, this condition, as to force and efficiency in a law, 
that it does not run counter to the settled current of thought among 
those who are to be its subjects. Every volume of statutes might 
supply us with lessons to show the impotence of mere legislation, if 
adverse to the sentiment of a people. How many a law framed with 
all the care, and enunciated with all the imposing circumstance of the 
most approved constitutional enactment, has lost its vitality, and now 
stands as a mere dead record of an obsolete thought, because the age, 
in its progress, has got in advance of the opinions in which it had its 
origin. Such statutes are like those which once signalized our records, 
scandalizing all professors of the black art, and pronouncing the 
penalty of death upon such as were guilty of “ conguration, witchcraft 
and dealing with evil and wicked spirits.” But I repeat, dependent 
as law is upon the tone of public thought for its efficiency, it often 
lends in return, efficiency to public thought itself. A nation’s code of 
laws is generally a fair reflex of the average collective opinions of its 
citizens. And there is truth in the adage that “ a nation is never 
better than its laws,” because so few think out their own thoughts, or 
attempt to be wiser than what they find recorded as the will and 
judgment of their rulers. They content themselves to come up to the 
standard of right and duty which they find prescribed for the people 
as a whole. And in this way, a statute is, ordinarily, the prevailing 
thought of a people upon a given subject, crystallized into a palpable 
and sensible form, and becomes in time a visible representation of the 
wisdom of the past. And in this way too, the judgment and opinion 
of one generation becomes a part of the inherited thought of those 
that come after it. The people of India have for more than twenty- 10 
five centuries, remained substantially unchanged in every thing 
that goes to form a nation’s characteristics. Separated as they have 
been into classes by an impassable barrier of caste, the impassive 
slaves of a degrading superstition, their natures dwarfed and their 
energies crushed beneath the dead organism under which they had 
lain; they are the victims of a code which, under the name of the 
laws of Menu, has for ages, stamped itself upon the character of each 
successive generation of the millions that compose that people. But 
we have, perhaps, a still more familiar example of such an influence, 
in the history of the people whom Moses led out into the wilderness 
from Egyptian bondage. What I wish to illustrate is the inseparable 
connexion there is between the social and political condition of a 
people, and the character of their laws; and to show, moreover, 
that the more fixed and established these become, the more deeply 
they impress their character upon that of the people who obey them. 
And I do this with the ultimate view of thereby showing the 
importance to every nation of maintaining a wise system of juris- 
prudence beyond the bearing it may have upon the passing interests 
of the hour. 
A recent French writer (Mons. Carpentier,) lias presented a 
contrast between the condition of the Jews and of some of the most 
polished pagan nations of antiquity, in the matter of domestic slavery, 
and of the power of life and death which masters, fathers, and in some 
cases, husbands, might exercise over their slaves, their children and 
their wives. Many would be surprised to know what is a familiar 
fact to every one conversant with the Roman law, that for a long 
period of time, in a city eminent for arts and civilization, the wife was 
the property of the husband, the father might sell his child into 
slavery ; and that one of the famous XII tables of the Roman law was 
in these words, “ Let a father have the power of life and death over 
his legitimate children, and let him sell them if he pleases.” Nor was 
child murder punishable as such, until Christianity had become the 
national religion under Constantine, in the fourth century of the 
Christian Era. 
An eloquent writer recently, in describing the power of a Roman 
father, tints speaks of its character and extent: “ The law in its turn 11 
clothed him at home with her own majesty. Seated upon his domes- 
tic throne or tribunal, he exercises without appeal, and beyond even 
the veto of the tribune, a despotic authority in his family. He has 
the power of life and death over his wife, his child, his slave, his 
debtor. They are his money.” “ As for his slave he may be cut up 
to feed the fish in his ponds.” What then may we not believe, 
was the condition in these respects of the barbarous Eastern nations 
by whom the Israelites had been surrounded while in bondage and on 
their passage to their new homes beyond the Jordan, until Moses 
began his work of national reform. Our purpose is not so much with 
what he accomplished, as with how he did it. lie had a stubborn, as 
well as a barbarous race to deal with. He undertook to root out 
some of their most inveterate habits, and to a recurrence of which 
they were constantly tempted by the example of the neighboring 
tribes and nations. They had an almost invincible propensity to 
idolatry, and were ready at times to offer even their children to 
strange gods. His mission was to civilize and reduce them to habits 
of decency, cleanliness, and a regard for the sanctity of human life. 
He soon found that such radical changes as these in the habits 
and opinions of such a people, was a slow process. It was to little 
account in the life of a nation, that a reformer had come among them, 
whose commission was attested by the thunder and the earthquake. 
The generation to whom these were addressed, was a brief one. The 
memory of his utterances was frial and uncertain. And if he would 
make a deep and lasting impression upon tlie hearts and habits 
of thought of such a people, he must put his precepts into a form 
which would be palpable to their senses. And he did it in the tables 
of a written law, to be read and repeated before them all; to be 
associated with the earliest impressions of childhood, and to be made 
a test of nationality as well as a standard of moral and social duties. 
He made his code to this end, entire and complete, with a solemn 
charge that what thing so ever he had commanded them, they should 
observe to do it, and should not add thereto nor diminish from it; 
and he enforced the injunctions of obedience to those commands 
by the sanction of threatened national calamities. Ilis code enforced 
the worship of One Supreme Being, the sacredness and inviolability of 12 
human life, except for crime, and the duties and relations of social and 
domestic life; the effect of which, wherever observed, has been to 
elevate and refine a people. 
This was a part of that law which our Saviour came to fulfil 
and not to destroy. And it Was, and has been, I repeat, an illustration 
of the power of a people’s law to give the force of sentiment to their 
thought, and of instinct to their moral convictions. 
It is by such and similar processes that any law may be made 
the means and instrumentality of advancing or retarding a nation’s 
civilization. And it is, for this reason, that the character of a people’s 
laws becomes a test and criterion of their own character. In the 
universal disposition in a community to adopt whatever opinion 
prevails there on the score of authority, men rarely stop to scrutinize 
the grounds upon which it rests, or question the results to which 
it leads. The penal laws of a State, in this way, become the prevail- 
ing standard of moral duty among its citizens, and men are content to 
act up to that, however short it may be of the requirements of a 
refined and educated conscience. And this may account for the 
memorable failures in the measures of social policy, where wise rulers 
and earnest reformers have undertaken to carry out schemes of 
beneficence and improvement, which found no root in the national 
life, because they were too much in advance of what the masses 
understood or desired. And yet the world does make progress in 
thought, culture and refinement, as well as in the arts of invention 
and the comforts and luxuries of life. Some one has said that “ when 
Pericles flourished in the bright and palmy days of civilization in 
Athens, Germany and France were inhabited by tribes hardly in 
advance of the civilization of the tribes of New Zealand.” Nor is the 
truth of what I have been trying to illustrate, any the less obvious, 
though the cradle of the law and the birth-place of civilization in what 
is now Christian Crete, is being borne down beneath a yoke of 
despotism as cruel and barbarous as that against which the Almighty 
led forth his favorite people, when he redeemed the land of promise 
from the worshippers of strange gods. It is not, indeed, to the law 
alone that we may ascribe the advance and progress of nations. 
Commerce and learning and the arts have been alike busy in working 13 
out the revolutions which the world has witnessed. But commerce 
and the arts have in their turn owed their power and success, in 
no small measure, to the fostering care which better and wiser forms 
of law have extended to them. “ I cannot but imagine,” says an 
English Jurist, writing an hundred years ago, “ that the inhabitants of 
this country are in the 18th century, infinitely more virtuous than 
they wTere in the 13th, and that the improvements of the mind and 
regard for social duties have gone hand in hand with the increase of 
learning and commerce.” (Barring Stat. 137.) 
Nor will this remark lose any of its force when we come to apply 
it to the 19th century, and our own favored land. Civilization lias 
kept pace in a great measure with developments in science and 
discoveries in the useful arts. And has shared in that free play of 
thought, which has sprung from its emancipation from the slavery of 
ignorance and ancient prejudice. Mr. Buckle, in speaking of this 
progress, tells us that “ the vigor of public opinion is unaffected by the 
laws of mortality. It does not flourish to-day and decline to-morrow. 
And so far from depending upon the lives of individual men, it is 
governed by large general causes, which, from their comprehensive- 
ness, are in short periods scarcely seen, but on a comparison of long 
periods, are found to out-weigh all other considerations.” And, 
although we may not be ready to adopt the conclusions to which his 
reasoning leads him, there is great force in the manner in which 
he has expanded this thought, in what he says of the power of kings 
and rulers compared with that of the untitled masses. “ The history 
of every civilized country,” says he, “ is the history of its intellectual 
development, which kings, statesmen and legislators are more likely to 
retard than to hasten, because however great their power may be, 
they are, at best, the accidental and insufficient representatives of the 
spirit of their time; and because so far from being able to regulate the 
movement of the national mind, they themselves form the smallest 
part of it, and in a general view of the progress of men, are only 
to be regarded as the puppets who strut and fret their hour upon the 
little stage, while beyond them and on every side of them, are forming 
opinions and principles which they can scarcely perceive, but by which 
alone the whole course of human affairs is ultimately governed.” 
(1 Buckle, 354.) 14 
But I am in danger of exhausting my hour, in following the trains 
of thought which open at every step as we advance in the subject 
before us, without reaching what ought to be of prominent importance, 
the practical bearing and application of this relation of law to Social 
Science. 
If law is another name for a form of public thought, and borrows 
its force and character from the tone and color of sentiment which 
prevails in a community, giving aid and progress to the culture 
and refinement of a people ; if, in return, a people are influenced and 
controlled in matters of opinion by the laws under which they live; 
if the morality of a nation is affected by the character of its penal 
enactments ; and in addition to all these, the several departments 
of Social Science are themselves more or less dependent upon the 
forms and administration of government and law. There is little 
danger of exaggerating the importance of inquiring how and by what 
means the jurisprudence of a people can be advanced, and at the same 
time, improved. Law becomes, in this way, a part of Social Science 
itself, because it enters into every thing which relates to the social 
well being of every individual of which a community is composed. It 
renders Social Science another aid by providing the means and 
instrumentalities by which it works out the problems with which 
it engages. It supplies Education with its schools, Charity 
With its hospitals, Reform with its sanctions, and Economy 
with its machinery of business and its processes for enforcing 
and sustaining private credit. It lends a hand to the poor, 
and cheers on the down-cast and the unfortunate. It is ever in 
advance of the ignorance that keeps back a nation’s progress, and 
gives new power to a nation’s productive energy and skill, by teach- 
ing to the laborer the laws of health; while it throws around the 
humblest home of the poor Ulan, the charm of order, cleanliness and 
comfort. It gives, moreover, consistency and stability to even- well- 
grounded scheme, whether of charity or health, or moral culture, 
which benevolence can devise, or the better feelings of our nature set 
in motion. 
I understand the force of the strong terms in which 1 have spoken of 
the functions and offices of the law, in its connexion with those of 15 
Social Science ; and I have only to take down a volume of our own 
statutes, to point' out what legislation has already accomplished, 
imperfect as has, at times, been the knowledge on wdfich it was 
founded. Or I might ask you to take up the record of what the 
Association for Social Science have done, and are doing in England, 
illustrated as it is by the names as wTell as the learning and research 
and thought of many of her ablest jurists. I could, in this way, show 
that the cause in which wre are engaged, is neither new nor strange, 
nor impracticable. It has work for all to do ’who are walling to 
forego the selfish profits of the hour, and to look abroad into the social 
condition of the neighborhood or town or country with which they are 
united by a thousand ties. 
Do you ask me in wdiat this work consists ? wdiere we are to look 
for it ? or when we are to begin ? I answer, we can hardly go amiss. 
“The Greeks are at our bwn door.” We cannot look out of our own 
windows or traverse our own streets, without seeing and meeting 
objects of Social Science. If I have not misconceived the importance 
of good lawrs, or the source from which all law emanates, there is 
a mighty work to be done here and everywhere, to educate the 
people, to give direction and tone to public thought, to check the 
waywardness of passion, and create in the public heart a sentiment of 
national honor as wrell as love of country. And this is not to be done 
fitfully or for a day, but, in the rapid succession of generations, to be 
repeated every day and for all time to come. And it is to be done by 
what we write, and say and do. Every man may set a wise example, 
and in that way influence others, though his voice is never heard at the 
hustings or at the corners of the streets. It is not necessary that a 
man should be a candidate for the presidency in order to do better 
than he speaks. The work calls for men earnest in action, as well as 
in thought. And in no field has woman a wider and more ample 
scope for the exercise of those qualities and attributes by which she 
makes her power felt, than that in which this Association professes to 
be engaged. 
Let us see, for a moment, what we have before us to do here in 
favored, prosperous Massachusetts, with all her institutions of learning, 
charity, health and Christian benevolence. We have two hundred 16 
and sixty-one thousand children, between the ages of five and fifteen, 
to educate; and of these, more than twenty-seven out of every 
hundred attending no school; and, in this city of schools, seven 
thousand in the year 1867, belonging to this number. More than 
ten thousand of her population are supported as paupers, out of the 
industry and thrift of the others. While thousands of grog shops are 
busy in multiplying inmates for our alms-houses and prisons. In 
1866, more than fifteen hundred such were openly doing this in this 
city alone. Of the foundling children sent to one of our alms-houses 
in 1864, seven out of ten died in a single year. More than ten 
thousand persons charged with crime, were committed to the county 
and city prisons. While the number not yet steeped in guilt, who 
were inmates the last year of the Reformatories at Lancaster, 
Westboro’, The School Ships and Boston House of Reformation, 
exceeded fifteen hundred. And these out of a population of only 
a million and a half, distinguished for wealth, intelligence and general 
culture. To go no further into detail, is there not enough in these 
statistics to indicate the vastness of the work for Social Science and 
reform all over this wide continent ? Was there not an obvious 
fitness that this Association should date from a call issuing from the 
Board of Charities of this Commonwealth ? 
The aid which this work may derive from that instinctive principle 
of reverence and respect for law, is among the strongest reasons why 
laws should he wisely framed and implicitly obeyed. The open viola- 
tion or disregard of one law, if done with impunity, leads to a violation 
of others, and in the end demoralises the sense of the public. Respect 
for law in the public mind, is what a man’s moral sense is in regulat- 
ing his conduct and character. Indulgence in one vice, weakens the 
restraint in the hour of temptation, of virtuous resolution and 
obligation. If a law against rum selling is openly violated without 
censure, that against cheating and fraudulent dealing loses its sanction. 
Political lying and trick, to carry a party measure, or secure a party 
election, are followed by peculation and defalcation in the agents of 
banks and railroads, in the whiskey ring and the holders of public 
moneys. The South followed the lead of politicians in breaking 
through the obligations of the constitution and the law, and now what 17 
a spectacle of lawless violence and insecurity of property and life does 
she exhibit to the world ? And where are we to stop here at the North, 
if we listen for a moment to that syren song of repudiation, and save 
thereby a few dollars in money, at the expense of national honor. 
What is to become of the law of private contracts ? What is to keep 
up that high toned sentiment which marks the gentleman and the man 
of honor, whereby his word is as good as his bond ? If Social Science 
can do no more, let it teach national honor and the law on which 
private and public honor rests. 
But let us not be misled in regard to the proper sphere and duties 
of such an Association. It is not their purpose to provide the means 
by which the hungry are to be fed, or the naked clothed, to open 
schools for the ignorant, or to minister to the sick and the infirm by 
building hospitals, or watching by the bed-side of the friendless and 
the outcast. These are the work of other but kindred associations. 
The object at which this aims, is to study out and remove the causes 
of poverty, to dry up, if it may be, the sources of crime, and show 
how the ignorant may be taught, the idle employed, a knowledge and 
taste for the comforts and decencies of life diffused, a self-respect 
created by the cultivation of habits of cleanliness, and the seeds 
of pestilence and disease eradicated from the lanes and alleys of our 
cities, and the productive industry of the country spared the waste of 
life and health, which rob it of so much of the very element of power 
on which it depends for its success. If it were to do no more than to 
mature a feasible plan by which the sons of toil and their families 
could escape from the pent up dwellings in our narrow and sunless 
streets, into the pure and blessed light and air of the country, with the 
surrounding of comfort and neatness in their own homes, it would be 
a service to the cause of humanity, which would place it as an 
Association, among the first of the benevolent enterprises of a 
benevolent age. 
To do all this, or any considerable portion of it, might, indeed, 
seem to be a vain and hopeless effort on the part of any individual, or 
of any single association of individuals. But the friends of these 
reforms have this to encourage them in their work, that even the 
agency of a single mind becomes, if well directed, a, self-creating 18 
power, which gathers strength with every step it takes. Other and 
similar associations may be confidently looked for in other sections 
of our land, till Social Science shall no longer be an abstraction ; till 
its laws shall be studied by tbe statesman arid politician as well as the 
philanthropist, and its purposes find a response in the intelligent 
good-will of the people. To do this, will take time and effort. It 
will require concert and co-operation. The rich man must give 
of his abundance, and the thinking man of the treasure of his best 
thoughts. Nor can I see any more direct or effectual means of 
carrying forward these reforms, than is offered in the instrumentality 
of the law itself. Let us have wise and honest law-givers, upright, 
learned and independent law interpreters, and bold and fearless law 
administrators ; and is it too much to believe that it would tell upon 
the character and opinions and social policy of the nation? These are 
something upon which the people can act with a power and effect 
which all may feel. And might we not hope, in that way, for a 
return of those days when office was associated with the idea of 
virtue and intelligence and merit, instead of being a pitiful prize for 
men to play for at the game of politics ? Might we not hope that the 
lobby and the ring might no longer throw an odour of dead and 
decaying manliness around our halls of Congress and legislation ? 
Is it not time for the country to awake to its true condition, and the 
perils that hang over it ? There is no want of individual intelligence, 
integrity or high purpose in the land. We have daily examples 
of these on every side. But it is, that in the rapid multiplication of 
our people, the haste that every one is in to get rich, the sudden 
changes through which society and business are passing, we cease 
to be startled at anything as new or strange, and hardly stop to look 
at means of winning money or office, provided the end be crowned 
with success. Nor is it easy to reach and correct this growing evil. 
Politics is too full of trick, to undertake itself a crusade against 
a depraved public sentiment. And the pulpit, even, has enough to do 
in taking care of its own theology and making war upon vice and sin, 
without going down to the hustings or the “ irregularities ” in State 
street. The remedy in a free State, is to be sought in the intelligence 
and moral sense, that go to make up the average sentiment and opinion of the people. These it is, that are to be educated and 
purified, and made to bear upon our laws and the selection of our 
law-givers. The country, in other words, needs and must have an 
“ awakening ” in its moral and political thought— or something which 
answers to a temperance reform among the people when men give up 
unhealthy stimulants and habits that do violence to reason, for a 
healthier regimen and a less excited course of life. We have had so 
much of late, to stir up and agitate the public mind, that whoever 
seeks to reach it for purposes of reform, by cool and dispassionate 
appeals to reason, finds himself as powerless as if he were addressing 
the ear of a deaf man. To talk of temperance with effect, one must 
make use of intemperate language. The whole country, north and 
south, has been moved to its very centre with the passionate dis- 
cussions on slavery, and for five years every town and village of the 
loyal States have been stirred to feelings of irrepressible indignation, 
which can hardly find adequate expression in words, at the outrages 
of a causeless rebellion, and the atrocities of civil war. This intensity 
of public feeling and popular emotion, which have thus been awakened, 
has almost rendered it necessary to indulge in strong epithets, exagger- 
ated statement, and stirring and exciting appeals, if one would attack 
a popular vice, or arouse the people to political action. And the con- 
sequence is that not a few of our leaders are the men who are willing 
to make use of such instrumentalities, instead of the cool, and calm, 
and considerate moralists and statesmen, who think and act upon the 
broad basis of what, in the long run, is the best, and highest and 
wisest policy for a people. In its influence, this habit of the public 
mind reaches beyond the excitement of the hour. Our government is 
ultimately controlled in its administration by the force of the average 
thought of the people. And a wild extravagant policy in the conduct 
of its affairs, can no more be a safe one, because it is popular than it 
would be if the power were in a single hand. And it matters little 
whether the passion that prompts to this policy, be that of “ the 
Macedonian madman or the Swede,” or of fifty thousand electors led 
away by the sophistry or the party cant of demagogues in the caucus. 
Is there not then something here for Social Science to do? Is it 
not time that with all our sects and parties, we should have one 20 
organization which is above and outside of party, and sect too, whose 
purpose should be to make men wiser, better and happier ? 
All I have said, or can say, can only claim to be hints for your consid- 
eration and reflection. My time, as well as your indulgence are, I fear, 
too nearly exhausted to allow me to enter more into detail, upon the 
means by which these ends are to be attained. If the theory upon 
which our government rests is well founded, that the people can and 
ultimately do dictate what shall be the policy and laws of a State, the 
work which is to be done here, is to begin with the people themselves. 
It is to teach them the laws of moral and political science, in order to 
supply them with some better light to guide them, than the fitful blase 
of party excitement, or the will-o’-the-wisp fancies of visionary reform- 
ers. What they want is facts and fair reasoning, and not fanciful theories 
or confident assertions. Natural science makes progress only as fast as 
it settles its facts. And the same must be true with moral science. It 
is the business of those who would guide public thought in matters of 
economy or charity, education, or criminal reform, first to master, for 
themselves, the facts upon which their own opinions rest, and then to 
lay them before the minds of the masses who are to practically apply 
them. The public are pretty sure, in the end, to detect fallacies in 
reasoning, if they are in possession of the premises upon which it is 
founded. Let this be done calmly, dispassionately, and persistently, 
and it is the surest way of counteracting the wild schemes of reform 
and phases of partisan policy which mislead honest minds, and keep 
the people in a ferment. 
It may be opposed to this notion of working upon the public mind, 
that to do it effectually we must resort to the same extravagance in 
the means which we make use of to check or divert the current of 
popular feelings which gives this current, at first, its momentum and 
power, that is, force against force, extravagance opposed to extrav- 
agance. But comparing small things with great, let us remember, 
that while the Founder of our faith and his followers were quietly and 
unpretentiously uttering by the wayside and in the streets of the cities 
of the Empire, the simple but sublime truths of a new dispensation, 
the halls of the Caesars were ringing with the sounds of imperial 
revelry; and of the busy throngs that crowded her streets, only here 21 
and there one turned aside from the eager pursuit of pleasure or 
business to listen to its messages. Every thing went on as before, 
and the dream was unbroken that such was to be the Rome of future 
admiring ages. But it was the truth alone that carried with it the 
vigor of immortality; and the stranger now pauses in curious wonder 
to spell out upon some broken column, or crumbling monument, dug 
up out of the ruins of the eternal city, the fading initials of some 
forgotten Caesar. The. true power of any sentiment is not to be 
judged of by its comparison with the factitious excitement of the 
passing hour. We may test it in the light of more than one of the 
phases of thought through which the country has passed in the last 
half dozen years. Let us take one through which it is now passing. 
For years the growing pride of one section of our country was in her 
slavery. That, thank God, is constitutionally dead now. But the 
inquiry is, what is to supply its place in the public thought of that 
section ? It is one thing, to preach submission, and a far different 
one to point out how to restore the South to her accustomed pros- 
perity, and win her back to the Union and her true nationality. The 
calm and dispassionate thinkers upon this subject know, that this can 
only be done by a wiser organization of labor, by which labor shall 
be made honorable, by the laborer being educated and elevated to 
the condition of equal rights, and the reign of law be restored to that 
distracted region. To this end, the South is to be made to see and 
understand how it is that this has been done at the North, and what 
its legitimate fruits have been. One fact is worth more, to this end, 
than a dozen tirades against a defunct institution. The work, in the 
end, is to be done by opposing facts like these to the false pride, the 
foolish passion and the perverse ignorance of social laws of a Bourbon- 
like oligarchy, which forgets nothing old and learns nothing new. It 
is to be a work of time. But in the rapid succession of new gener- 
ations, old prejudices may die out, and kindlier feelings take their 
place, if the people there can, by interchange of views with the other 
states, be disabused of the notions which their political leaders have 
so sedulously spread among them. Or, let us come nearer home and 
see whether something may not be done to advantage here, in respect 
to the social and economical condition of our own community, by 22 
substituting facts for theories, arguments for harangues, and reason 
and judgment for prejudice and passion. There is a political economy 
that does not expend itself in the business of trade and production ; 
which has to do with the raising and expending public moneys, and 
whose laws of good sense and common honesty may be mastered by 
every one who will lend it a thought. 
And coming still nearer home, with the knowledge that we have, 
that education and moral culture are indispensable conditions in the 
improvement and good order of any community; we have the fact 
before us, that our prisons are tenanted by men who were reared in 
our streets ; who were suffered to grow up without the Christian edu- 
cation of home or school; living like the young fox, by the Avits of 
instinct, watched by no eye but that of the police, and strangers to 
the kindly charity that takes the wayward child by the hand, and 
gently lead him up into a purer atmosphere and a healthier region of 
life. May we not, with facts like these, reach the heart and the judg- 
ment of a people without the need of extravagance or exaggeration ? 
There is science even in the discipline of a prison and the reform of 
the prisoners. The idea is growing obsolete that the proper mission 
of these massive jails and these ponderous bars and gates of peniten- 
tiaries, is to inflict vengeance upon the poor wretch Avhose infancy was 
cradled in the filth of a drunkard’s home, and upon Avhose childhood 
no pleasant smile nor cheering word of encouragement e\'er shed a 
ray of happiness or hope. 
I have no time left to pursue these thoughts, and all I need add 
is, that they have their foundation in the true purposes of Social 
Science, as I understand it, and that it is to the Law that we are to 
look for aid and efficiency in accomplishing its work. It is one of its 
appropriate functions to regulate the tone and curb the extravagance 
of an excitable and an excited people. And in advocating the 
importance of wise laws, wisely and honestly framed, and firmly 
administered, Social Science is not only pleading the cause of justice, 
but of a common humanity. It is doing more ; it is doing battle for 
the life as well as the honor of the country which we are proud to 
call our own.