But the unfortunate fact remains that all laws, however perfect, must in the end be administered by imperfect men.  There is, alas! no such thing as a government of laws and not of men.  You may have a government more of laws and less of men, or vice versa, but you cannot have an autoadministration of the Golden Rule.  Sooner or later you come to a man—­in the White House, or on a wool sack, or at a desk in an office, or in a blue coat and brass buttons—­and then, to a very considerable extent, the question of how far ours is to be a government of laws or of men depends upon him.  Generally, so far as he is concerned, it is going to be of man, for every official finds that the letter of the law works an injustice many times out of a hundred.  If he is worth his salary he will try to temper justice with mercy.  If he is human he will endeavor to accomplish justice as he sees it so long as the law can be stretched to accommodate the case.  Thus, inevitably there is a conflict between the law and its application.  It is the human element in the administration of the law that enables lawyers to get a living.  It is usually not difficult to tell what the law is; the puzzle is how it is going to be applied in any individual case.  How it is going to be applied depends very largely upon the practical side of the matter and the exigencies of existing conditions.

It is pretty hard to apply inflexibly laws over a hundred years old.  It is equally hard to police a city of a million or so polyglot inhabitants with a due regard to their theoretic constitutional rights.  But suppose in addition that these theoretic rights are entirely theoretic and fly in the face of the laws of nature, experience, and common sense?  What then?  What is a police commissioner to do who has either got to make an illegal arrest or let a crook get away, who must violate the rights of men illegally detained by outrageously “mugging” them or egregiously fail to have a record of the professional criminals in his bailiwick?  He does just what all of us do under similar conditions—­he “takes a chance.”  But in the case of the police the thing is so necessary that there ceases practically to be any “chance” about it.  They have got to prevent crime and arrest criminals.  If they fail they are out of a job, and others more capable or less scrupulous take their places.  The fundamental law qualifying all systems is that of necessity.  You can’t let professional crooks carry off a voter’s silverware simply because the voter, being asleep, is unable instantly to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that his silver has been stolen.  You can’t permit burglars to drag sacks of loot through the streets of the city at 4 A.M. simply because they are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.  And if “arrest on suspicion” were not permitted, demanded by the public, and required by the police ordinances, away would go the crooks and off would go the silverware, the town would be full