NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW*

N American jurisprudence, natural law is both a foun-

dation and a stumbling block. It is a foundation,
because it lies at the root of our juristic tradition. It is
a stumbling block, because it is rejected by the pre-
vailing philosophy.
The result is a legal system which is actually shaped
in large part by a doctrine which in the formal treatment
of the subject is vigorously denied. And what is more,
this rejection of the doctrine in many cases comes from
those who in the administration of our legal system often
apply the doctrine with confidence and satisfaction.
The lesson is clear. What the law most needs today is
to reexamine its parentage. The philosopher must re-
examine it, to find what is truly ultimate in law. The
practitioner must reexamine it, so that he will know the
meaning of the instrumentalities with which he deals.
And by practitioner I mean not only attorney and coun-
sellor, but all those who carry on the affairs of the law,
including legislator, judge and executive. All these may
draw a lesson from a conversation which once took place
between Henry Ford and three laborers. Mr. Ford asked
these workers one day what they were doing. The first
one said he was making a Collar an hour. The second
Also printed in 23 Notre Dame Lawyer 125 (1948).

85
86 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

said he was laying bricks. The third said he was building

a church. Unless the lawyer sees justice as the objective,
he is merely working by the hour or laying bricks. And
if he sees that justice, and sees it in the very principle of
its being, he will see it in the subject of this Institute, in
the much belabored but perennial natural law.

The current denial of natural law is one of those strange

anachronisms in human thought by which, instead of go-
ing forward with a progressively clearer understanding of
a doctrine, the course of thought suddenly reverses itself
and turns backward toward ancient errors and discredited
sophistries. Natural law had pushed its way up from
cloudy apprehensions of it among the early Greeks and
Stoics to its position in mediaeval thought, whereby it was
recognized as the end principle of positive laws, the moral
limitation of the ruling power, and the foundation of free
government. At that point in history, the prospects were
bright. A new era had dawned. It was recognized that
the state was entitled to the allegiance of the people, but
it was also recognized that the rulers were the servants of
the people and ruled with their consent, and that the peo-
ple possessed rights which were paramount to the will of
the ruler. The constitutional mechanism which would
define citizenship, restrain tyranny and enfranchise the
populace, was yet to be developed, but standing on the
mediaeval doctrine of the dignity of man and the nature
of society, its growth was clearly prefigured. But then a
curious thing happened. The mechanisms of constitution
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

and ballot box went forward; but their doctrinal basis

began to disintegrate.
If we look at our own national life, we find these two
conflicting forces clearly at work. Natural law had per-
sisted long enough in men's thinking to serve as the
explicit foundation of the American republic, both in its
political and its judicial aspects. Then the divergence
intrudes itself. The practitioners go on, extending the
constitutional framework and perpetuating the Anglo-
American ideals of reasonableness and natural justice as
the test of legislation and decision; but the philosophers
and theorists turn backward and strike with the vigor of
rebellion at the traditional basis of our boasted progress.
The habit of viewing laws as ultimately grounded in
norms inherent in the nature of man and society gave
way to analytical jurisprudence, which viewed laws as
pure facts wholly disconnected from morals; to historical
jurisprudence, for which the ultimate source of laws is
evolving custom; and to positivism of many varieties but
all of them united in the concept that under the ever
changing stream of fact there is no intelligible abiding
substratum and therefore no truth superior to the tran-
sient findings of experimental science. And if we wish
to look for the nethermost point to which this avalanche
of negation has carried us, we can find it in one of the
recently published Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pound,
wherein the author says that the assertion "that the law-
maker should be led by justice and that the courts have
to 'administer justice' " is "completely senseless." More-
over, says the author, "There is no justice. Neither is
•88 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

there any objective 'ought.' . . . Thus the entire legal

ideology-including rights and duties, wrongfulness and
lawfulness-goes up in smoke." 1
There is a deep significance in the fact that natural law
continues to inspire and integrate our legal system in spite
of this defection of the theorists. For this very survival is
a fact which to the scientific mind should be suggestive
of a hidden reality worthy of inquiry and research.
The evidence of natural law in our system is so wide-
spread as to be undeniable. In the first place, there is
implicit evidence of it in all those laws which reflect the
jus gentium, that is, laws which are so spontaneously ex-
pressive of the human conscience that they are charac-
teristic of the legal systems of all civilized countries. Such
are the laws against murder, theft, treason and all those
acts deemed mala in se as contrasted with mala prohibita.
Such laws are but implicit evidence of natural law be-
cause, while they reflect natural law, they contain no
explicit reference to their natural law foundation. If the
foundation be doubted, however, one may ask, why are
certain evils considered mala in se? If there be no higher
law, why is not a statute dealing with murder in the same
class as a traffic ordinance or a law governing the endorse-
ment of a negotiable instrument? The answer is that
however trenchant the negation of the philosophers the
lawmaker persists in considering himself as morally bound
in the one case and not in the other.
1 Vilhelm Lundstedt, Law and Justice: A Criticism of the Method of
justice in INTERPRETATIONS OF MODERN LEGAL PHILOSOPHIES, ESSAYS IN
HONOR OF Rosco- POUND, 450, 451 (1947).
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

But the case for natural law in our legal system does not
rest alone upon such implicit evidence of it, however co-
gent that evidence may be. There is explicit evidence of
it also.
It is conspicuously evident in equity, which received its
foundation from the importation into the Roman law of
the jus gentium and the Stoic morality as correctives for
the omissions and inequities of the jus civile. Later, under
the influence of Christianity, as Pomeroy says, "the signifi-
cation of aequitas became enlarged, and was made to
embrace our modem conceptions of right, duty, justice,
and morality." 2 In England it was likewise in response
to the rigidity and incompleteness of legal forms that
equity arose, first in the conscience of the Chancellor and
next in a system of positive jurisprudence expressly found-
ed upon the eternal verities of right and justice. As a
result, says Pomeroy, "the principles of right, justice, and
morality, which were originally adopted, and have ever
since remained, as the central forces of equity, gave it a
necessary and continuous power of orderly expansion,
which cannot be lost until these truths themselves are for-
gotten, and banished from the courts of chancery." 3
But perhaps the clearest and most explicit adoption of
natural law in our legal system occurs in the constitutional
guaranties of natural rights. These rights had been pro-
claimed with classic dignity and precision, in the pream-
ble of the Declaration. The Declaration was echoed in
2 Po, .ov, A Treatise on Equity jurisprudence, Sec. 8 (5th ed, S. F.,
1941).
3 Op. cit., Sec. 59.
90 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

the constitutions of some of the original states, as in that

of Virginia which still provides, "That all men are by
nature equally free and independent, and have certain
inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of
society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest
their posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and
pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

While the Federal Constitution failed to incorporate

these principles in itself as the constitutions of Virginia
and other states had done, the same result was achieved
in our Federal system by a process which is now historic
and which bears eloquent witness to the vitality of natu-
ral law in our jurisprudence. This historic process was
initiated a century and a half ago in the doctrine of im-
plied limitations of legislative power. A case in point is
Calder v. Bull, decided by the Supreme Court in 1798, in
which Justice Chase said, "I cannot subscribe to the om-
nipotence of a state Legislature, ... although its authority
should not be expressly restrained by the constitution, ....
An act of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) con-
trary to the great first principles of the social compact,
cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative
authority .... The genius, the nature, and the spirit, of
our state governments, amount to a prohibition of such
acts of legislation; and the general principles of law and
reason forbid them." 4 From this, Justice Iredell dis-
sented, saying that in the absence of a constitutional pro-

4 3 Dallas 386, 387, 388, 1 L. ed. 648, 649 (1798).

 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

vision the courts cannot invalidate a law "merely because

it is, in their judgment, contrary to the principles of natu-
ral justice." 5
The issue raised by Justices Chase and Iredell demand-
ed a solution, for it went to the core of the Supreme
Court's responsibility. That the soltuion came in the
manner in which it did is a sign of that persistence of
natural law which defies its critics even to the present day.
The solution came in the due process clause, pursuant
to which no person may be deprived "of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law."
But what was "due process"? Was it, as its words im-
ply, a mere procedural safeguard, or did it include sub-
stantive rights as well? Coke identified it with the phrase
"law of the land" in the thirty-ninth chapter of Magna
Charta, a phrase which Justice Johnson said was "intend-
ed to secure the individual from the arbitrary exercise of
the powers of government, unrestrained by the established
principles of private rights and distributive justice." 6
The signs were unmistakable. An express constitutional
clause being needed to satisfy those who were discontent
with implied limitations, due process was to supply the
need by including substantive rights.
The culmination occurred in the application of the due
process clause to state legislation through the Fourteenth
Amendment. The question was whether due process, in-
terpreted in the substantive as well as the procedural
sense, served to bring under the protecting arms of the

5 3 Dallas 386, 399, 1 L. ed. 648, 654 (1798).

6 Bank of Columbia v. Okely, 4 Wheat. 235, 244, 4 L. ed. 559, 561
(1819).
92 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

Fourteenth Amendment the entire bill of rights which

was contained in the first eight amendments. The Su-
preme Court's answer to that question constituted an
explicit judicial affirmation of natural law which is now
the settled doctrine of the Court. For in answer to the
question, the Court held that not all the enumerated
rights were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment but
only those which involved those "immutable principles of
justice which inhere in the very idea of free govern-
ment," 7 those "fundamental principles of liberty and
justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political
institutions," 8 and those immunities "implicit in the con-
cept of ordered liberty." 9 And moreover, said the Court,
this is so "not because those rights are enumerated in the
first eight Amendments, but because they are of such a
nature that they are included in the conception of due
process of law." 10
Thus natural law, excluded from the judicial chamber

7 Holden v. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366, 389, 42 L. ed. 780, 790 (1898).

8 Hebert v. Louisiana, 272 U. S. 312, 316, 71 L. ed. 270, 273 (1926).
9 Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 325, 82 L. ed. 288, 292 (1937).
The tests mentioned in the Palko and other cases cited were enumerated
by Mr. Justice Frankfurter in Louisiana v. Resweber, U. S. Supreme
Court L. ed. Advance Opinions, Vol. 91 - No. 5, pp. 359, 365 (1947).
In a special concurring opinion in Adamson v. California, U. S. Su-
preme Court L. ed. Advance Opinions, Vol. 91 - No. 17, pp. 1464, 1476
(1947), Mr. Justice Frankfurter discussed the subject again, saying, "In
the history of thought 'natural law' has a much longer and much better
founded meaning and justification than such subjective selection of the first
eight Amendments for incorporation into the Fourteenth. If all that is
meant is that due process contains within itself minimal standards, which
are 'of the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty,' Palko v. Connecti-
cut, 302 U. S. 319, 325, 82 L. ed. 288, 292, 58 S. Ct. 149 (1937), putting
upon this Court the duty of applying these standards from time to time,
then we have merely arrived at the insight which our predecessors long
ago expressed."
10 Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78, 99, 53 L. ed. 97, 106 (1908).
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

as an abstraction, reentered the chamber in the concrete

garb of the constitution. It was an illustration of the fact,
frankly acknowledged by Justice Harlan in a later case,
that "the courts have rarely, if ever, felt themselves so
restrained by technical rules that they could not find some
remedy, consistent with the law, for acts, ... that violated
natural justice." 11 It is also an illustration of the real-
ism of the poet Horace, "Naturam expellas furca, tamen
usque recurret. You may drive out nature with a pitch-
fork, yet it will always return." 12
It is to this adherence to natural law under the aegis of
due process that we are indebted for the protection by our
courts of one after the other of our cherished rights: the
inviolability of conscience, the right to express one's con-
victions, to acquire knowledge, to work at one's chosen
calling, to educate one's children, and to those other con-
ditions of freedom and self-realization which, as the Court
says, are implicit in natural justice.
This persistence of natural law in the hands of the prac-
tical jurists is a sign of its compelling reasonableness, a
reasonableness which sets practitioner against theorist
even when they are combined in the same person. Noth-
ing else can explain the phenomenon of Justice Holmes
who as a philosopher poured his scorn upon natural law,
but as a judge felt compelled to decide a case on what he
termed "fair play" and "substantial justice"; 13 or the

11 Monongahela Bridge Co. v. Urited States, 216 U. S. 177, 195, 54

L. ed. 435, 443 (1910).
12 EPISTLES, I, x 24, quoted by HEINRICH A. ROMMEN, THE NATURAL
LAw, 267 (St. Louis, B. Herder Book Co., 1947).
13 McDonald v. Mabee, 243, U. S.90, 91, 92, 61 L. ed 608, 609, 610
(1917).
 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

more explicit confession of Judge Dillon who, though

accepting the doctrines of analytical and historical juris-
prudence from a theoretic standpoint, abjured the doc-
trines in his practice, saying, "If unblamed I may advert
to my own experience, I always felt in the exercise of the
judicial office irresistibly drawn to the intrinsic justice of
the case, with the inclination, and if possible the deter-
mination, to rest the judgment upon the very right of the
matter. In the practice of the profession I always felt an
abiding confidence that if my case is morally right and
just it will succeed, whatever technical difficulties may
stand in the way; and the result usually justifies the con-
fidence." 14
Looking therefore at our legal system in the concrete, it
may fairly be said that the sysetm possessed in large meas-
ure a natural law foundation, and that natural law has
continued to inspire and integrate it in conspicuous degree
in spite of the most persistent and devastating attack to
which a doctrine could possibly be exposed. Has this just
happened, or is there an abiding, objective link between
man-made laws and those first principles of the practical,
human reason to which, with greater or less fidelity and
subject to whatever lapses, man ever returns in the practi-
cal art of government by law? That it is the latter, analy-
sis will surely show.
II

There are three levels of law. Since it is of the utmost

importance that these three levels be carefully distin-
14 LAWS AND JURISPRUDENCE OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 17 (1894),
quoted by POUND, LAW AND MORALS 36, 37 (1926).
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

guished, a uniform terminology is greatly to be desired.

I will use the terminology proposed by Professor Morti-
15
mer J. Adler, namely, principles,precepts and rules.
Of these, the ultimate reality is the principle. It is the
practical judgment that good must be done and evil
avoided. It is not a conclusion drawn from premises by
reasoning, but in the sense an intuitive judgment, a self-
evident or first principle. Hence it cannot be proved or
demonstrated, and by the same token it need not be
proved or demonstrated. It is the counterpart in the prac-
tical reason of the principle of contradiction in the theo-
retic reason. It is the starting point, the foundation, of
the science of right and wrong.
At the outset, it is important to observe a basic distinc-
tion. The principle Seek the good directs man to his end,
which is happiness, or the possession of what is good for
man as man. But man's nature being complex, his happi-
ness involves a multiplicity of goods. Therefore, the first
principle may be expressed in two ways. It may be ex-
pressed simply Seek the good, to refer to the whole of
goods, or it may be broken down into several principles,
to refer to the various goods. Some of these goods relate
to man's private life. With these we are not here con-
cerned. The good with which we are here concerned is
the common good, that is, the good of the whole com-
munity, which to the individual is but a partial good be-
cause man, though a social being, is not simply a social
being,-a distinction which, byi the way, separates a free
society from a totalitarian one.
15 A Question About Law, in ESSAYS IN THOMISM 207, 212 (1942).
96 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

For our subject matter, therefore, the principle is Seek

the common good. This is the natural law, strictly speak-
ing, or if by law we mean positive law, perhaps we may
better say this is the principle of laws. 16 But this princi-
ple, likewise, is capable of being broken down by analysis
into the three propositions expressed by Ulpian in the
third century, do good to others, avoid injuring others,
and render to each his own. The first two of these are
the principles of general justice, that is, of justice to the
community, and therefore they are also called legal or
social justice. The third-renderto each his own-is the
principle of special justice, that is, of justice to the indi-
vidual, which from the viewpoint of the state is called
distributive justice and from the viewpoint of another
individual is called commutative justice.
The next level of law, which we will call precepts, is
made up of conclusions which are immediately and neces-
sarily drawn from the principles and which constitute the
means for the attainment of the social good which is ex-
pressed by the principles. They are sometimes called the
secondary principles of the natural law. They consist
generally of the jus gentium which I have mentioned,
propositions which characterize the laws of all societies
because they are necessarily deduced from the principles.
It is true that these precepts are a part of the natural law,
in the sense that they are not of man's making but are
conclusions from the principles, but on the other hand
16 This proposal is made by Professor Adler in A Question About Law,
above cited. I think that the proposal constitutes an important contribution
to clarity on this subject, because of the confusion which has arisen from
use of the term law for both the principle and the rule.
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

they differ from natural law strictly speaking in the sense

that they are the result of a process of reasoning, as con-
trasted with the indemonstrable and ultimate character of
the principles. Both principles and precepts are incapa-
ble by themselves of governing action,-for different rea-
sons, however: in the case of principles, because they
specify only the end, and action depends on specification
of means; in the case of precepts, because they specify
the means only generally and without reference to the
contingent circumstances which are always involved in
action. The inadequacy of the precept in a specific case
may be illustrated by the precept against killing. Obvi-
ously the precept aims at wrongful killing, but it fails to
define the circumstances which makes killing wrongful as
against those which make it justifiable, and it also fails to
specify the punishment. What the precept needs, to serve
as a guide of action, is to be embodied in a more specific
mold, that is, to be determined by receiving that particu-
larization necessary to bring it to bear upon the contin-
gent facts of life as they exist in the concrete. It is akin
to the process by which a craftsman, in order to build a
house, determines the general form of a house to a partic-
ular shape. The house cannot come into concrete exist-
ence without the general form. The general form cannot
result in a house without the reduction to a particular
shape.
Out of this process of deteimination of precepts arises
the law in the lawyer's sense, the positive rules which gov-
ern specific cases. To this third level of law can be
applied St. Thomas Aquinas's definition of law as "an
98 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him

who has the care of the community, and promulgated." 17
When we enter this third level, we enter a new world,
which is in sharp contrast to that of the other two levels.
For whereas at the first two levels the reason is necessari-
ly governed by objective "oughtness," either in the sense
of first principles or of conclusions necessarily drawn
therefrom, now, at the third level, all is tentative and un-
certain, contingent and changeable. The reason is that
rules involve facts, from which two consequences flow.
The first is that since facts are infinite in number, they
cannot all be comprehended by human reason. There-
fore any rule which is based upon them must be based
upon the generality of experience and will be defective
to the extent that it fails to provide for the unknown or
the unusual case. The second is that facts change, and
therefore laws must change, to preserve a reasonable rela-
tion to facts.
In comparison, therefore, with the principles and pre-
cepts of natural law, which are necessary propositions and
bind reason in their grasp, the rules of positive law are
relative, contingent and changeable. The tax statute, for
example, or the law governing the relations between capi-
tal and labor, or the law which will govern the use of
atomic power, represent efforts by the lawmaker to bring
the precepts of justice to bear upon facts of such inex-
haustible complexity and profound changeability that the
justice of those laws can never be more than approximate

17 SUMMA THEOLOoICA, I-I, q. 90, a. 4.

 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

and tentative. Therefore, far from being final or conclu-

sive, they need amendment and revision to keep pace with
the findings of the social sciences and with the evolution
of the social order to which they apply.
It may be of passing interest to note that this doctrine
of the essential relativity and contingency of positive law,
which sounds so refreshingly modem in an age dominated
by science, was actually laid down by a mediaeval monk
writing in a monastic cell. In fact, so impressed was this
monk, St. Thomas, by the relativity of laws that he said
that "suitably to introduce justice into business and per-
sonal relations is more laborious and difficult to under-
stand than the remedies in which consist the whole art of
medicine," 18 a confession which, in view of the state of
medicine in St. Thomas's day, was a confession indeed I
This should be the answer to criticisms based upon that
caricature of natural law by which men endeavored in the
last century to deduce a whole legal system from the prin-
ciples of natural law. Positive rules are not deductions
from natural law; they are determinations of it. That is,
the area of the functioning of the lawmaker is coextensive
with the degree by which the precept is undetermined,
namely, by which it needs determination by reduction to
a particular form. And this particularization involves a
choice among matters which are in themselves indifferent,
because it is only to the extent that these matters are in-
different that the precept remains undetermined. There-
fore it follows that positive laws or rules are the products
18 ETHICORUM, V, 15, quoted by ROMMEN, op. cit., 12 p. 252.
100 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

of acts of the will, in that the will specifies the particular

determination to be made from among alternative indif-
ferent ones, although of course the formulation of the
alternatives is made by the intellect. In other words, law-
making is an art. It is a work of prudence. From this it
is also evident that laws are made, not discovered, except
in the natural principles in which they are ultimately
grounded.

This should also serve to answer the criticism of the

natural law as being a glittering generality, incapable of
governing the particular case. The natural law is not
designed to govern the particular case; but, as Pollock
said, neither are the general principles of any science. 19
A science is made up of principles and applications. Nat-
ural law is the principle of laws. Laws are the applica-
tions of that principle in the government of human
conduct. Without the laws, the principle is sterile. But
without the principle, the laws would be irresponsible and
anarchic.

. Finally, what has been said should undermine the

charge that natural law involves a fixity which is an obsta-
cle to progress. Natural law is timeless, in that man is
eternally related to the common good and to his neighbor
by the bonds of justice. Law involves constancy and
change. The constancy is in the principle, which lies
behind the facts; the change is in the rule, which includes

19 Review of BRowN, INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY: ITS NATUtRE AND IN-

TERESTS, XXXIX Law Quar. Rev. (1923), quoted by CHARLES GROVE
HAINES, TEE REVrVAL oF NATURAL LAW CONCEPTS 330 (1930).
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

the facts. Progress in law can come from two directions.

It can come from those changes in rules which are neces-
sitated by greater knowledge of circumstances or by
change in circumstances. It can also come from an in-
creased awareness of the natural law itself, as it has in the
abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women and the
recognition of the common good as the end of govern-
ment, and let us hope, as it will some day, in the abolition
of racial discrimination and war.

III
Natural law has survived because men naturally think
in terms of it. The legal realists tried to exclude values
from laws, but in vain. The values which they thrust out
through one door reentered through another. And any
effort to place those values at any point short of the ulti-
mate principles of the practical human reason is similarly
futile. There is no choice between these principles and
some other source of values. The only choice is between
values and an effort to remake man without values, the
consequences of which we have lately witnessed. These
consequences are not happy ones, and they are radically
alien to the tradition by which we live. Moreover, their
appearance in the twentieth century constitutes a warning
that however rugged is the force of natural law in human
thinking, there is no guaranty, even in a civilization in
which that doctrine has been the major thread for a mil-
lennium and a half, that that thread may not be tempo-
rarily lost, with results which threaten the extinction of
justice and the death of that civilization. Truth will rise
102 NATURAL LAW INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS

again, though it be crushed to earth. But it can be

crushed to earth, and at this moment it is crushed to earth
in the larger portion of the globe.
We who retain the truth in our practice, toy with an
alien philosophy at our peril. As a man thinks, so is he,
or so he will be. Even now the signs are not wanting. A
moral science has discovered a divine power in the atom,
which for lack of values has already been used experi-
mentally on human beings and now challenges not only
constitutional guaranties but life itself. The family, the
unit of society, is a vanishing institution. Education is on
a starvation diet, deprived of the fundamental orienta-
tions of philosophy and the things of the spirit. Thus we
in the democracies, on whom has fallen the burden of
world leadership in a critical hour, are ourselves "disre-
garding the omens and disdaining the stars." 20
If the legal philosophers persist in denying our birth-
right, salvation must lie with the practitioners, whose pro-
fession Dean Wigmore called a "priesthood of justice."
In order to discharge the duties of that priesthood, the
legal profession must recapture its standing as a learned
profession. And mere knowledge of facts is not learning,
even though those facts be laws. A higher intellectual
dedication remains, a dedication to those principles which
give to laws their meaning, their purpose and their ulti-
mate claim to the allegiance of men.
If legal education takes its part in this high task, and if
the practitioner rises to the responsibility thus presented

20 G. K. Chesterton.
 NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW 103

to him, the day may yet be saved, and the struggle for
law and justice which has been the glory of Western civili-
zation may be prolonged to avert that crisis which now
threatens to dim its light forever.
Harold R. McKinnon