It is never easy to get a Legislature to repeal a law.  Generally some organization or committee of people is interested in keeping it alive, and the members of the Legislature fear losing their votes.  Social ideas are always changing.  No laws or customs are eternal.  The ordinary man, and especially the man under the normal, cannot keep up with all the shifting of a changing world.  There is always a fraction of a community agitating for something new and gradually forcing the Legislature to put it into law, even against the will of the majority and against the sentiment of a large class of the community.  The organization that wants something done is always aggressive.  The man who wants to prevent it from being done is seldom unduly active or even alarmed.  Many organizations are eager to get statutes on the books.  One seldom hears of a society or club that is active in getting laws repealed.  The constant change of law, the constant fixing of new values in place of old ones, is necessary to social life.  This means putting new wine into old bottles, and wine that is much too strong for the bottles.  Everybody can see why some particular law might be violated without a sense of guilt, but they cannot see how a law they believe in can be violated without serious obliquity.

Apart from this, there have always been crimes that were not of the class that implied moral wrong.  The acts of the revolutionist who saw, or thought he saw, visions of something better; the man who is inspired by the love of his fellow-man and who has no personal ends to gain; the man who in his devotion to an idea or a person risks his life or liberty or property or reputation, has never been classed with those who violate the law for selfish ends.  The line of revolutionists, from the beginning of organized government down to the birth of the United States and even to the present time, furnishes ample proof of this.  And still the unsuccessful revolutionist meets with the severest penalties.  To him failure generally means death.  Men who are fired with zeal for all new causes are forever running foul of the law.  Social organization, like biological organization, is conservative.  All things that live are imbued with the will to live and they take all means in their power to go on living.  The philosopher can neither quarrel with the idealist who makes the sacrifice nor the organization that preserves itself while it can; he only recognizes what is true.

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty.  Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty.  It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.  Emerson said that the good citizen must not be over-obedient to law.  Freedom is always trampled on in times of stress.  The United States suffered serious encroachments on liberty during the Civil War.  During the last war, these encroachments were greater than any American could have possibly dreamed; and