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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...the stratification of classes on our domination in this country is just frightening, and -- because the masses are invading you and me, as people. With your punch cards, you are already treated as masses, of course. Statistically, we are all masses. And this millionaire, who claims that he is worth $44 million, just calls all of us peasantry, for this same reason, that we are now serfs in his eyes.

So victors and vanquished always give the law to each other. That's an old story that's already known in antiquity. You see, the American general's staff has no greater pride than to be recognized as the successor of the German general's staff. Because they defeated the German general's staff; how good must they be? I have heard a general say to me, you see, "Better the Germans couldn't do it themselves."

So the yardstick is easily lost. And don't be too sure that what you thought -- think is the tendency of social -- democracy, to make everybody an individual and a person, may just be in its outcome be the opposite, that we all end up as masses, to be fed on lies, on psychology, which is the same. Because the psychologist has the arrogance to treat us as though he could manipulate us. That's cheating. Here, you --.

Yesterday, I went to church; was a great protest action underway, because they have invaded even the -- the Sunday school with group dynamics, where they put people up against each other, hating each other, creating animosity, manipulating their answers, and so on. So nowhere are we sh- -- not even the Church that we are still the people of God. We are just little -- little idiots made -- been -- and made into scorpions.

So this is the tendency of the last hundred years, because there have been no safety valve. There -- nobody has ever considered the possibility that when you reform the masses, the outcome may be that we all become masses. The tendency then is { } completely open. It is absolutely undecided which way we are going. And who knows So Green Is My Valley? Well, the author, who is a -- as you know, a very delicate soul, has written a very tantalizing article on America and -- and Soviet Union, saying, "The green valley is doomed one way and the other. I can't see any difference."

Back to the ship. We had to -- have to explain what a crimp is. Now, in itself, the crimp is the -- the necessary tool by which you form the upper leather of a shoe. To crimp, then, a man, is to make him -- mold him, to form him. And from this origin -- has to do with "cramp." Cramp is this inst- -- too- -- crimp and

cramp is the same thing for your boot, as long as you still got custom-made shoes. Who -- who still wears custom-made shoes? Poor people. Masses. I still wear them. I feel very superior.

Well, don't you think this should be the first sign of a free man, that he walks on his own feet? But of course, you no longer touch the earth, you have such high heels.

You know that shoes can be a great question of social behavior. As long as our poor salesgirls in the shops, you see, were expected to wear -- dressed as a lady, they all had, of course, very soon, you see, wandering kidneys, and -- and fell sick, and fell ill. And it took a very great reform before the -- before the boss allowed these girls to have flat soles. So at least now they can. You don't. But they are no longer -- it's no longer prohibited. But by 1900, they could not. They had to ruin their health and their posture by having to stand 10 hours a day at that time, you see, behind the counter in wrong -- in wrong shoes. Shoes not made for sales and work, but shoes imitating the rich in their drawing room.

And most costumes, as you know, which we call "folk dress" are simply the no- -- dress of the rich having become obsolete in the hear- -- center and having gone out to the outskirts. In the same -- sense, the dress of a salesgirl to this day, is in most cases impractical imitation of wealth and leisure. They have to pose as though they didn't work.

The crimp is the best, I think, and most direct explanation of the labor question in general. And I'm treating here once more the sea and the fate of a seaman -- before the mast--not for its own sake, for any sentimental reasons of Herman Melville, or Dana -- Richard Dana--but in order to drive home to you the point that there will be eternally a labor question, and that no reform can change that. It's inherent in our performance of work, that this is a hierarchical order, and the sooner you drive out of your head the ridiculous term "democracy" for factory work and for the organization of production, the better you can help people to perform the -- this process in the right way.

I told you last time that nothing is so terrible than when I talk to these liberals and to these rose -- pink -- pinks, and so on, these idealists who think that declaiming on -- on democracy, they can change the fate of a worker. It's ridiculous. Democracy is for a man who can vote, who can use his -- reason. But democracy is not for people who are demanded to fit into a team, with their muscles, and their sinews, and their hands.

The crimp is the man who sells merchandise, the seaman on board ship, when the ship is in harbor and needs to -- has to be manned, usually in a hurry,

because every day costs money. And for the captain not to have his crew, is simply to go bankrupt. And therefore, the law always favored the captain so that he might get going. This is the meaning of the famous Latin word which was written on the front of the -- of the city hall of Bremen, the harbor in Germany, from which for 50 years as you know all immigration from Europe moved. It read, "{Navigare necesse est; libera non necesse}." To go to sea is necessary; to live is not necessary. And that certainly did apply to the seaman. They had to go on board, and to this day, gentlemen, you must -- con- -- reflect very profoundly on this--and the ladies, too--the contract of a worker on land cannot be enforced by physical deportation, but the contract on -- board ship can.

In other words, a police can bring, if he has a sign- -- man has a signed -- a contract, can force a man on board ship as in the military, because if he deserts the ship, the ship cannot sail. What do they -- are you going to do? They must be able to rely on this man. In a factory, if you just stay away -- all right, they don't have to pay their wages, but they cannot arrest you. There's habeas corpus. Your body is not involved. But in the shipping business, the body of the man is involved.

All this is unknown for landlubbers. And one thing is very strange. You live here in one of the great harbors. It's, I think, now as great a harbor as San Francisco isn't it? Or greater, San Pedro. And -- but the interest in the situation of the people on board ship is -- is still non-existent. There are two worlds.

Now the crimp master united two -- two qualities. He boarded the -- the -- sailor on board -- on land. He offered him susten- -- room and board, and he tried to get all his pay into his pocket by making him deliver his money and his contract papers, his articles of -- of -- of -- as a sailor into his hands. The trick was that he -- the crimp masters on the shore, they would not accept a man unless he gave up his documents. And through these documents, he was a prisoner. He could not move. And then there were the girls, and the liquor; so after three days, the man was broke, and he didn't have his papers, and he was a serv- -- therefore absolutely a slave.

This went on in San Francisco, I mean -- right to the last years before the new -- before the union of Harry Bridges took over. I showed you already here this book, British Merchant Seamen in San Francisco -- '92 to '98. And I told you that a friend of mine still had tal- -- told me that his father, who was a sea captain, never had a -- a sailor come on board sober. They were all transported on board ship in drunken state. Didn't know what they were doing. And that's { } -- a contribution of this captain who volunteered to tell me this, you see. The -- his son accordingly became dean of the theological seminary in Chicago to expiate. But then he was fired there, of course, for leftist leanings.

Now this is a whole world which people do not consider. And the trick then of the crimp is the following, you see: to dispossess the sailor as fast as possible of his means, so that he may sell him--that's all there is to it--sell him to the man in need, to the captain in need on the next boat. And this has -- this luxurious trade has gone on, I mean, for hundreds of years. And -- people were unable to reform it.

And now comes the point which I would like you to consider, because it has a much larger bearing than the problem of able-bodied seamen. It is your problem. It's the problem of the child. It's a problem of the woman -- women. It's the problem of a scholar. The problem of a -- inventor. It's the problem of everybody -- well, you'll see right; I won't give away the secret.

The Reverend James Fell, this very good Englishman who tried to reform the situation in San Francisco, said the whole problem was to pay the seaman--who made quite good money--to pay him in such a way that he couldn't be exploited by the crimp. He had to live on -- on -- on shore. Also he had to get some amusement, if you are tied up, as Magellan for three years in the -- on board ship, obviously there is an explosion bound to happen, when you go -- go on land. So that's all part. Where there is war, gentlemen, there is no morality, because the suffering is too great. Any civilian who doesn't understand why there are brothels in an army behind the front just hasn't been at war. This is not why these people like illicit intercourse. It's because they are condemned to this. This is something quite different. The -- the -- the misery. All these people know that there is a better thing than this, that there is real love. But you cannot se- -- separate the sexes for years from each other without -- or you create perversions, which are -- are much worse than a prostitute. In this country, you have officially no prostitution, but you have all the perversities. And that you call then "the abolition of the double standard."

The hypocrisy in -- is -- is terrific, you see. But the sailors of course, and their -- their -- their environment know that this cannot be helped. This is -- as long as there has to be people on board ship for months and months, something is bound to be irregular. And -- it is -- that's really so much the lesser evil than when all the crew is perverted on board ship. Then you can't have anything -- do anything. And obviously that's the other way.

So Fell proposed the following very simple solution: let the pay come to the sailor week after week, proportionately. If he stays on land--let's say, two months--he would receive every week his payment. The lawyers of this country said, "This is impossible. That's against the civil law." The stupidity of lawyers of course is always something to behold. I've been a professor of law for 20 years, and I know what I'm talking about. They cannot see a new -- a new situation

which is not on the books.

Now what is not on the books when you come to mass treatment? If you can tell me this, then we don't have to go into great detail. Civil law, all the law, all litigation, all the courts have no stat- -- standing for time, because all law began with the litigation over the dead man's inheritance. Now when the man is dead, the heirs can wait. He has to wait on this inheritance. All litigation is the delay of the law, as Hamlet says. Law is not to be had without delay. Anything under civil law, anything under law takes time. Therefore, time is neglected. "Oh, this is not counted." You go to court. You appeal the case, you see. May take you five years. Well, you and I, we cannot afford to live in misery for five years, you see; the corporation can. They pay the lawyer, you see. And therefore, we cannot go to court practically, or we are nervous wrecks, because this -- it takes -- you see, gets us down. We have to think all these five years how the case is going. And -- a corporation doesn't think, so they haven't to -- to worry, I mean.

So where there is time of the essence, you -- man is in the state not of a person, but of a pressed and hunted animal. All hurry, all haste, all urgency, you see, the -- it takes away from my liberty. The more urgent something is, the less liberty. The more lur- -- the less urgency, the more leisure, obviously. Therefore, where people are under urgency, they are not free. The most urgent moment is death. And certainly in -- at that moment, my freedom ends. I'm just either killed or die. And that's the end. You can be saved if there's still time enough to get oxygen tent. So you delay. Where you can delay, you are freer than where you can't delay. All immediate decision is therefore depriving me of my freedom.

Now the seaman cannot wait, said the lawyer -- cannot wait. He has to give -- get his money, and that is the perversion of the whole process. In an -- a process on inheritance -- a trial on inheritance, you can go to 15 courts and delay it. There have been trials on inheritance that lasted 18 to 25 years.

And there's a famous case on the litigation that Cornell University claimed in the '80s from a man and -- the -- the document of Cornell University, the foundation documents ran that Cornell should never have a larger endowment than $2 million, which is one -- of course, one of the most insipid regulations you can have for a university. But at that time, they thought it was very wise. Probably the man wa- -- thought of the dead hand--the possessions of the Church in the Middle Ages, you see, which became too big--and made such enemies that the Roman Church was smashed. Every -- all the goods here, you remember, all the -- all the missions were secularized for the same reason, because they had grown too rich. The dead hand was abolished. In the same sense, Cornell didn't want to have -- was not allowed to have more than $2 million. The whole problem was to prove that at the moment when this will of the donor was

opened, Cornell hadn't more than $2 million.

Well, this went back and forth, back and forth. Different accountants, of course, could be bought and proved their point one way and the other. And finally it was thrown out and -- Cornell didn't get its money, which is of course a very sad story.

But it shows only that the university could live without the money, and the will could rest, because the man was dead. And, so to speak, history was paralyzed, as I told you, for more than 10 years, because this litigation one way or the other was sidetracked from the life stream of the community. Cornell could go on without it, you see, and the dead man didn't have to eat. It was a sup- -- a surplus.

Where you have such a situation, you can forget time. The lawyers, however, who of course are the -- are the first semantical positivists--great liars--they said, "This also works in reverse. Since a man may have to wait for his wages, until the claim is judicially, you see, adjudicated, on the other hand, it is impossible to stretch the payment. The captain has no duty to wait until he pays the seaman in wages." Wonderful logic.

That is too much of an obligation for a captain to wait, and of course, the captain got his percentage from the crimp, and therefore the case was quite natural, you see, against the interest of the captain to oblige the -- the -- the -- the shipping company, or the captain himself, or the paymaster on board ship, to det- -- to send out every week a paycheck after the contract had lapsed. The -- I think even today any corporation would resent this very much and would say, "We are not there to pay rents. The social security agency may do this, but we are through with the man. He leaves the factory and we pay him off."

And the word "o-f-f," "sign-off," "payoff," is very popular in this country because it means so much water over the dam, forget about it. Never see the man again. Never think of him again. Our contract is over, and you can imagine his feeling is: that's only -- it only gets you into trouble, if you are under any obligation after the man has ceased to work for you. We won't have that.

And lo and behold, this simple reform could not be put through for 60 years, because the law forbids the protection of a man by paying him gradually.

Now you can see that all other points of law, all the benefits, all the wealth, couldn't help this seaman; as long as he had the money in his pocket, in his first rush on land, you see, and in his intoxication, it would be taken from him. There is just nothing else to be done, but to treat this man as a ward. You

cannot treat the man in the first week on land as he might be on board ship, you see, as a responsible sailor, or as he might be three weeks later. There is in -- a tide in the affairs of man a rhythm; and it is absolutely idiotic, as the law does, and as the lawyers do, and as the politicians tell you who flatter you, that you are the same person in all times -- ways of life. You aren't when you are asleep. You need protection then. The fiction is that you are awake 24 hours a day.

The same is true now about this greater curve of your life. Here is an exciting stunt you perform. You have been on board ship for four weeks in danger of life, a tempest; you land and you are already treated immediately as though you were a sober, you see, gentleman of leisure. These fictions, you see, they are called the civil law. And they have made it necessary to think up crutches, and fences of a very artificial type. And as you know, the first outcome was that the individual sailor signed off his rights to a union.

The union is the First Aid of this situation that the worker is not free at all times of his existence, and that the incredible lie--that what Marx calls the "bourgeois society"--is a fiction -- it isn't true of the bourgeois either, it isn't true of the wife of the bourgeois, it isn't true of the children of the bourgeois; certainly it's not true of the cook and the tutor of the -- or the -- the parson of -- in a -- in a -- in a--how would you call it?--merchant's community. The merchant is only treated as the equal of everybody else in his contractual situation. His wife never treats him as an equal. But the other merchants do, the stock exchange, and what we call the market place in the most general sense--including the supermarket--is the place from which all our law in the last 400 years has originated. It didn't before 1500, not even before 1600, ever come to anybody's head or mind that people were able to -- to dispose of their property, their time, their future, by contract.

You must -- in America it is very difficult, since you never had the antecedents in the -- on the territory of the United States. But to me, who have taught the history of law over 3,000 years for now 40 years, it is of course very normal to see that these last 400 years are purely accidental -- that is -- or incidental, that they are a very passing phase. And I think that I do -- render you a greater service since this is completely unknown in this country, by showing you the very specific charac- -- character of the civil law, which has -- abandoned, so to speak, the working man in the last hundred years, has abandoned however other groups of the population like the Negro -- and the red Indian, too, because the concepts of this common law, which is still prevailing in this country in the minds of all people who study law, is limited to the situation of the market place.

Before, however, finishing this, let me say one thing about these sailors. The crimp has been combated first by people like the Reverend Fell, by mission-

aries. Seamen's missions are a very early attempt to mitigate the lot, and of course, the first -- the idea was to build competing boarding houses, and to receive the seaman into a house where -- whose boss would not be a crimp, you see, and who would therefore not overcharge him, but would be a public charity, more or less. This has been successfully done in several countries, and there is such a home in New York, too. Whether it is here in -- in San Pedro, I don't know. Does anybody know? Wie?

(They have one here.)

They have one here. So it's only so boring that of course you cannot expect every sailor to go there. I mean, the solution is not of course a complete solution, because the man also wants to live, you see, and be gay, and he wants -- doesn't want to pray all time.

But I think perhaps you understand now that from -- from the man who steps down from board ship, what the union is. The union is his own waking eye while he is asleep, or while he is at leisure, or while he is tired, or while he is enjoying himself. The union is not a corporation in the sense your societies are. If you join the Society for Cruelty against Animals, and -- or the opposite, your life is here and the society is elsewhere. They hire a syndic, and they hire a typewriter, and they send out letters and you pay five dollars a year. And you think that most people in independent positions--or students--seem to think that a union is anything similar, that it is a society, that it is a corporation. And as long as you do think this, you cannot understand the function of a union. The function of a union is something quite original. It's the man himself while he's absent, you see, while he is on a pleasure trip, on a spree.

This is the intimate and the very complex situ- -- problem of the legal form for a union. In Germany, for example, where I know things best, of course, because I've been part and parcel of the -- teaching the law of indus- -- industrial law, and admiralty, and commerce for so many years, we had a tremendous time to acknowledge that a union should not be organized like a limited, like a I- -- I-n-c., you see. This same union, in as far as it had money and property was to be incorporate. But that was a sideline, only for property. They had banks, and they have stores, and, you see, such things. But for the purpose of -- of behaving like a merchant, a union is also a corporation. But with regard to the men's will and mind, they are the man himself. They are his better self on the market. And therefore they are open societies. They are just joint companies, you see, without any special legal status to this moment. We have unions in Germany, with 3, 4 million members, you see, which are not incorporate.

In order to be able to say, "We are the sailor who speaks," you see, "we are

not somebody separate," and not to have this complicated business, you see, of having -- signing away this man's freedom, which he couldn't. Here he only gets power of attorney, so to speak, by becoming a member of the union, you see. And therefore the union is the opposite from all your societies--church societies, Ladies' Aids, charity societies, you see, community chest. But you always -- I feel all -- most people confuse this. There are of course workers, and workers' wives who confuse this. The union represents the man, where you do no- -- never wish to be represented in your own actions, you see. It's just the very opposite from all these societies which you join, which add to your capacity, in fields for which you have no time.

But with the worker, it is the opposite, because he is already in the work, at the factory, on board ship. Somebody has to have the time to act where he cannot, you see. So the union represents the man in the heart of the heart of his existence. And you -- and we, I too, you see, we join activ- -- actions and activities, you see, on a larger scale together with others where neither our wives, nor our children, nor our own body is concerned. So besides their -- living our own life in our own home, we have other activities -- going, where we have -- offices. You understand how -- how miserable then the workers must feel when they see that the readers from all the newspapers speak about the teachers' unions, and all the abuses of the longshoremen. All these people do not understand first what the union is, so they have no judgment what an abuse is and what a use is. It's not so simple.

Now I do not wish to defend all the abuses. They are certainly here, and they are very gruesome. But the reforms where -- which I have seen advocated in this country, are very silly, because they always say -- think, "Here is a man who joins a club," you see, for his leisure, or for his special purposes, besides his -- his self, which he can -- protect, first himself. It is the other way around. A worker has the union where your own home stands. And he has--when he goes home--where you have the Audubon Society, he has his own bird cage; and he has his own plot of land; and he has his own things. And you join the Audubon Society, or get Harper's magazine, you see. That is, there you subscribe to something, you see, get in touch with legal persons. The -- I mean, you just think of this Book-of-the-Month Club business, where you abdicate your -- your better mind, but where -- that doesn't touch your -- heart of your existence at all, it's a sideline.

So the union is at the center where the home stands. And the sidelines, you see, they are for the I-n-c. business. And for your hobbies, for your leisure.

This has never been talked out in this country. It's a terrible confusion, because this country has only the contractual thinking of the common law as its

only starting point. And there aren't -- it is not mentioned that there are -- have been of course -- there are situations even today, as in marriage and inheritance of quite a different order. You only have to think of a nun, or a monk who as- -- associates in an order and abdicates there his, you see, dies -- his -- his -- his economic death voluntarily. That's called "death" in the very picturesque language of truth and real- -- realism, which the Church has always cultivated, so that you might know that death is always in life, that you cannot buy something for nothing. The American heresy how- -- is -- always is that on the marketplace, you can cheat and you can buy something for nothing.

As long as you believe this, you cannot understand the law of labor, because in labor, you do die to your freedom of decision. You are moored to the -- your working -- to the -- to the lathe, to your working place, to the conveyor belt, to the board -- to the ship. And therefore, wherever a man gives up his own will, he dies. Death, when you marry, you begin to die. That's the first moment of our death, because we abandon -- we cut off possibilities, you see.

The -- wedding is the middle of life, therefore, because there the curve begins to turn to your inevitable fate that one day you will die completely to your own will. It's the first act -- by which -- where you give up your self-will. And where the self is destroyed, there's death.

I'm -- have been asked to tell you all about Russia and the Russian -- compared with Russia. I think I render you a greater service if I show you that Russia and America are very ephemeral appearances, phenomena on the globe of the earth. I cannot get excited over these things of the last 20 -- 30 years. It's -- the law of humanity has a much wider breadth. You will not solve any of these problems either with Communism, or -- nor with people's capitalism, nor with any of these things in such a hurry. The civil law -- the seaman's evils have there -- been there -- look at this, and have been known and have been complained of for 400 years.

So be a little more patient. And allow me to tell you that as an historian, I -- I think I furnish you with better arms and weapons for understanding what is the danger today of the American people: to become masses without noticing it, by showing you that the common law, the law of the merchant -- market place, where we sign on the dotted line, is not the only law that has so far emancipated mankind in our struggle for order and progress.

The first law -- there is always a relation between law and discipline. On board ship, we saw there's discipline. In the factory, there is discipline. On a highway, there is discipline. In schools, there is no discipline, so therefore there are no schools.

I have seen -- these progressive reformers advocate school courts, where the child -- children could, you see, plead their case; and briefs would be, you see, handed over; and there would be a court; and the children of course would -- you have it here, I think, in this student council business, too, you see, this playing around with the law. It's { }, you see, because the law always means delay. Now real life doesn't brook delay. We are in a hurry. What's the -- does it help the worker he can go to law, if he has to know whether he can work in the same factory the next fortnight, you see, or if he has -- can -- or he cannot? This has to be decided. Where is -- where am I, while the law is taking its course? Am I in prison? Or am I free? Or am I still in the same position?

The same of course is true with the children in divorces. That's the problem, obviously, and not that the -- Reno, you see, is borrowed by all the other states of the union, because Reno spares the fam- -- family the delay of the law. And the hypocrisy of this country of course is wonderful, you see. In New York, you cannot be divorced except for adultery. And I don't know how it is here in -- in California. And the Catholic Church prevents of course divorce. But since there is misery, and calamity, so you can in six weeks get a divorce in -- in Reno. And -- officially, this is another state, but practically, it is simply the handmaid for the other states of the Union, as you all know. The law is borrowed, you see, by the other states, why? Not because it is a fair law. Not because these divorces should be given so cheaply. But because it is decided within six weeks. That's of the essence. And anybody who has lived long enough knows how many families are -- you see, how many family fortunes are decided. You have money enough to go to Reno, much misery can be spared. And if you haven't the money to go to Reno, it may take you five, six, seven years of tremendous calamity to get out.

So the time element is the justification for the existence of Reno. Nothing else. Nothing -- that's not un- -- discussed here, you see. People just think it's just another state. We can write laws, what he can -- of course unjust laws are unjust laws. If divorce is made too easy, it's made too easy. If it is made too difficult, it's made too difficult. This is material injustice or justice, you see. But there is inherent in the process of law itself, you see, the element of loss of time.

And now come to see this. The people in the oldest orders of life -- take the -- even the -- take even the first settlers in -- in California. As you know, they had no -- only discipline. All the mining was enforced by discipline, not by law. That is, you had vigilantes, you had a voluntary police, and there was no court. But there were command -- orders given, and that is -- that's discipline.

So the law in the -- in any new community, in any new formation of a kingdom, or a republic, or a city, will only take care of those things that can wait. And the first thing then of which the law has regulated, let us say, among the --

the -- our ancestors, the tribes, of mi- -- migratory tribes of the first 500 years of our era, has been the law of inheritance.

When a father of a family dies, of course, you have to know what en- -- dowry the daughter gets, and how -- how the land is divided between the sons. And therefore, there has been a time where the law courts only functioned for the law of inheritance, and for nothing else. For everything else, you had feuds, you had vendetta, you had self-help, you see, you had pawns, and more -- pawning, you see, by giving each other, you see, directly, security as we call it, you see, surety. And the courts were not advocated, invoked, because they wouldn't have any authority to interfere with the bubbling life of people who moved rapidly over the countryside.

This country, by the grace of God, has lived in the last 150 years all the stages of the law, in a great hurry. This -- goes to the last -- to the last -- the -- the most fundamental forms. The settlement in the United States in the East was first done still on hilltops in New England, just as the oldest settlements of mankind, 3000 B.C. And then they went only gradually to the -- to the semi- --how would you call it?--the -- half, half-altitude between the top and the valley. And the valley in my state, for example, was only reached hundred years after the first settlement in Vermont. That's exactly the way of civilization in the world at large.

The city of Florence--who has been to Florence?--you see, was settled thousand years later than Fiesole, because Fiesole was -- is on top of the mountain, and Firenze, you see, and Florence was partly dangerous, because it was down in the river valley, you see, where you could be flooded, and you could be -- fall sick from fever, and you could be attacked. By which I mean to say, the law fortunately in this settling of the frontier has repeated the slow growth of the -- real law of all communities. And I assure you that the famous Sutter case in California, where the property of the man, you see, after it had been destroyed, was in -- under jurisdiction. You may have heard of the -- the case, have you? In the Sacramento Valley. The great -- the great property of Sutter was destroyed by the Gold Rush. Who hasn't heard of Sutter? Well, you all have.

And he's a typical example of the { } litigation, you see. He was able to carry this on to the Congress in -- to the la- -- last days of his life, as you may recall, because it didn't matter any more. It was destroyed, you see. And where you have already the -- the cessation of order, then you can go to court, you see, for repair. The -- it was no longer a going business. If Mr. Sutter still had been the -- in the business, you see, he -- just wouldn't have had the means, the time, you see, of -- to go to court, and to -- to -- to plead with all the Congressmen, as he did, and senators, they should help him.

So please, always think the first law has only to do with the consequence of death, of corpses. Like in The Niebelung, when Siegfried is dead, then you can do something -- undertake something.

The origin of the law, as a -- distinct from discipline is that some part of life comes to a standstill, anyway. And you go to court to try to make it move again. Here is the dead inheritor, the dead hand, you see, an inheritor; and you try to make it move. There you get an inkling that the law is quite inept for regulating life processes that must not come to a standstill. The law only interferes after the family has bro- -- life has broken down, for example. Then you go to court and plead, you see. As long as it is going, for Heaven's sake, don't go to court, you see. That would mean the breakdown of the family. Every -- knows -- every -- every couple knows this, that to go to court means the end of the marriage. Before, you cannot go to court.

So if you once see this, you would laugh at the social democracy people, who think that by laws, they can improve the status of the worker. The law can only come after a breakdown. It doesn't help to -- to do something by law, because in the meantime, the milk is spilled, the man is ruined, and what-not.