It does not result in the satisfactory enforcement of the law, but in its wider evasion.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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A government which is continually flouted in its attempt at administration is bound to attempt even greater severity.
Few things are more detrimental than this to the moral equilibrium of a social order.
It persuades it to think out mean and petty expedients for the enforcement of the law in the same way as its subjects think out mean and petty expedients for its evasion.
It loosens all the principles of conduct which make for social peace by making us think of the rules under which we live as unjustifiable and oppressive.
But popular sentiment, in England at least, would not, in my judgment, approve a law forbidding the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquor; and its chief result would be to direct the minds of thousands to the problem of ways and means…
Popular sentiment approves a law against murder, and you can enforce that law.
Now I think it is an elementary principle of penal psychology that you cannot make a crime of conduct which people do not a priori regard as criminal.
They wear a breach of the law as a badge of courage, like the revolutionary in Czarist Russia or the suffragette in pre-war England; and the imposition of penalties upon them arouses in them and their friends a sense of angry injustice.
It becomes a principle of conduct which gives rise to special pleasure and peculiarly satisfies human vanity.
Illegal conduct becomes a matter even of pride.
For where a particular statute is regarded as foolish or obnoxious by a considerable body of persons, they will rejoice in breaking it.
Legislation which does not fulfil this condition is always unsuccessful, and always has the result of bringing the idea of law itself into contempt.
What it seeks to do must broadly commend itself, on rational grounds, to those over whose lives its principles are to preside.
The power of law to define modes of social conduct depends very largely upon its ability to command a sentiment of general approval.
From the angle of character, the only rules of conduct in this realm that work, are those that are self-imposed.
Both forms of behaviour do real injury to him; neither produces an attitude of conviction.
He loses, that is, the habit of truth, on the one hand, or the capacity to give and take which makes for decent citizenship, on the other.
His presence there does him no good because his mood is inevitably one of gnawing indignation at being compelled to participate in ceremonies that have no meaning for him.
Most people would agree that a statute compelling an atheist to go to church was utterly foolish.
It is to compel me to live at the behest of others even where I can discover no ground for the behest.
To insist that their rule of life is to be mine is, normally, to destroy my personality.
I cannot pass my life adjusting my conduct to standards and habits which represent the experiments of other people.
I must, in general, learn my own limitations by experimentation with myself.
It makes him pass his life under the aegis of a system of fear-sanctions which, for the most part, he will be quite unable to sublimate, and the result will be that sense of continuous frustration which is fatal to freedom.
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