Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/555

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The Green Bag

encouraging thrift and allowing those to whom wea Ith passes in adult life to remain under economic disability. The policy of supporting a people by property, capital, or wealth is destructive and condemned by race intelligence. In the struggle to maintain the political edifice, the social aggregate will tend to place under disability large classes, military or servile, and in struggling to save itself under this condition of disability, instead of to save or to serve the race as a whole, it will surely go to pieces; history affords no instance of the permanent survival of a state. The social aggregate will also often place itself under a form of disability by yielding to the force majeure exerted by an ambitious great man, creating a military non-industrial class which can in no sense be considered a product of the race mind. 6. The race thus exists not because of, but in spite of, the action of individuals and of social aggregates, and progress, as history proves, depends not upon social organization but upon social dissolution. If the foregoing conclusions are submitted to careful tests, nearly all of them will be found either to be totally false or to require material qualification. For example, it is not true that the secure possession of wealth won by labor or by careful employment of capital is a form of disability. Neither is it true that an army actively engaged in protecting the lives and homes of citizens is marked by a condition of disability. It is also wrong to suppose that the morality of the social aggre gate, what is usually called "positive moral ity," is fundamentally distinguishable from racial morality (this author's hypostasized language), if indeed such a thing as racial morality can be supposed to exist in a sense apart from positive morality. Consequently this author's theory of a super-social judg ment, so to speak, in condemnation of the social order in general, and of the incorrectly defined disability connected with the social order in particular, is visionary and fantastical. Some of his observations, however, are in tensely stimulating because not only partly true, but novel and penetrating. Eace Problem. "The Conflict of Color; I, The World Today and How Color Divides It." By B. L. Putnam Weale. World's Work, v. 18, p. 12023 (Sept.). This first installment is to be followed by a second, on "The Yellow World of Eastern Asia." "Both Japan and Turkey can take care of themselves; and the developments which have come about in these countries have been very startlinely reflected in the general unrest and dissatisfaction which have spread from one end of Asia to the other. Asia is not content. Asia begins to understand. If China, the other great representative of the politically free peoples of Asia, is either led or forced quickly in the footsteps of Japan and Turkey, a very new era in the relations between Europe and Asia must soon commence. For the question—the discussion of which has appar

ently been adjourned sine die—of the status of the Asiatic in America, in Australia, and in South Africa, will certainly then be re opened and its solution very possibly worked out in a most peculiar way in regions where the white man can least protect himself— that is, in Asia itself." See South African Union. Socialism. See Government, Property and Contract. South African Union. "The Constitutional Union of South Africa." By Walter James Shepard. A merican Political Science Review, v. 3, p. 385 (Aug.). "The provisions of the fundamental law by which it is proposed to consolidate the four self-governing British colonies of South Africa under one general government, and thereby lay the constitutional basis for a great Afri kander nation, are best studied in comparison with the constitutions of Canada and Aus tralia, from which it has directly borrowed much, and with that of the United States, which has served as the ultimate model for all three. The tendency toward economic and industrial concentration, becoming ever more pronounced, which in the United States is impelling a centralization of government by the extremely laborious and unsatisfactory method of judicial interpretation ... is pushed a long stride farther by abandoning the federal type of government and uniting the four colonies into a consolidated union. . . Their complete ultimate dependence upon the government of the union . . . leaves them in effect merely important divisions for local government. "South African Union and the Color Ques tion." By Roderick Jones. Nineteenth Cen tury, v. 66, p. 245 (Aug.). "Natives and colored people who at pres ent possess the franchise cannot be deprived of it: they are beyond the reach even of the two-thirds majority. . . . "The natives and the colored people will be in a stronger position under the Union than they were before." See Race Problem. Stare Decisis. "The Theory of the Judicial Decision as Influenced by the Effect of an Overruling Decision." 29 Canadian Law Times 741 (Aug.). "Blackstone, maintaining that judges do not make, but simply find the law, asserted that a decision never creates a new rule of law but merely embodies a rule or custom which always existed. A resulting corollary of this theory is that a decision is not the law, but merely evidence of it, and an overruling decision does not abrogate or change the law of the overruled, but authoritatively asserts that it never existed. It necessarily follows that an overruling decision, unlike a repealing statute, must have a retrospective operation. Austin and later writers, instancing examples