"A Ass, A Idiot"

Trustees of Columbia University last week received the annual report of Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Increases in faculty salaries, accomplishments of faculty members, gifts to the University--these and similar academic matters were included in Dr. Butler's report. More important to Dr. Butler, who is as much the publicist as the pedagog, was a disquisition on the Law, particularly the Law in its lack of majesty.

"That part of the social fabric which is called the law," said he. "needs overhauling. ... It may well be that we shall discover among the mass of statutes, judicial decisions and administrative rulings which now confront us, some that are law, some that are partly law, some that are no law, and some that are antilaw. . . . When conduct and the law are at odds, the fault may lie with the law. . . ."

Arguing particularly against the theory that the law is sacred as such. Dr. Butler declared: "Laws are not made by Legislatures or by courts except in form, save insofar as the general will accepts them. No law which has to do with human thought or speech or conduct can by any possibility be enforced. . . . If it be urged that all statutes . . . that have the form of law have also by reason of that very fact the full force and authority of law, then one can only sigh and repeat softly the immortal words of Mr. Bumble:* 'If the law supposes that, the law is a ass, a idiot . . . and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience.' "

*Mr. Bumble: Character in Dickens' Oliver Twist. Smug, self-righteous, disagreeable, he is the beadle in the orphan asylum at which Oliver disgraced himself by asking for "more." It was Mr. Bumble who christened Oliver, as follows:

"Notwithstanding the most superlative, and, I may say, supernat'ral exertions on the part of this parish," said Bumble, "we have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother's settlement, name or condition."

Mrs. Mann raised her hands. . . . "How comes he to have any name at all then?"

The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, "I invented it. ... We name our foundlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S,--Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin and the next Zwilkins. . . ."