d simple question is, has
Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing knowledge and methods
in this matter or has he not? We don't want to know whether they were
large or small additions nor what the consequences of your admission may
be. That you will leave to us.'

Holsten was silent.

'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.

'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he
must disregard infinitesimals.

'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel put
the question? . . .'

An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:
'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It
is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The oldest of old bottles
and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake
them.'

Section 4

There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was
'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation to current thought and
widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material
and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing
still more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world
were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and
procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and
obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric
times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges,
their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward
and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and
political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, that
now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in
the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest
of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating
body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual
interests and established institutions to the collective future, is
traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times,
and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and
opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
political order. Already in the early