IOO Foundations of Democratic Dogma
the Christian view of man that the doctrine has any signifi-
cance whatsoever. And yet many, with a lack of logic no-
torious among us Anglo-Saxons, tried to hold fast to this
dogma and at the same time to maintain a view of man
which was in complete contradiction. Gradually this contra-
diction made itself more and more felt, until the doctrine of
natural rights was largely abandoned and for it was substi-
tuted a purely relative and operational conception of rights
and justice. I think it is of the utmost importance that we
should realize just what has happened to this democratic
dogma in the last decades, that we should fully understand
where we now stand.
This process of degradation has been both practical and
theoretical. In courts of law, principles have been insidiously
sacrificed to utility and power. The demands of an ex-
panding scientific and industrial civilization led to a con-
stant violation by capital of these sacred rights—a violation
which was offset by a corresponding will to power on the
part of labor, which, just as callously, ignored these princi-
ples. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that theoreti-
cally also—in our universities and law schools—there has
been a continuous destructive criticism of this dogma—until
it has finally resulted in an almost complete abandonment of
this historic foundation of modern law, and in a resort to a
theory of force which differs only in expression from that of
Nietzsche and his followers.
Even our Supreme Court has not been exempt from its
influence. In an article in the Harvard Law Review, Chief
Justice Holmes spoke in this spirit of the right to life. He
tells us that there is no pre-existing right to life. It is just
an arbitrary fact that people wish to live. It simply means
that if you take a life you will have to suffer the conse-
quences. He even goes on to suggest the situations in which
sacrifice of life to property is justifiable. I have no desire to