Our tenacious belief in a government of laws the like of which the world has never seen elsewhere...There are now on the statute books of the nation and the states no fewer than twenty thousand laws relating to the railroads alone. Thomas Jefferson once asserted that a government was best when it governed least. What would he say, were he to rise from his grave and survey a government which practices the principle of non-interference to the tune of twenty thousand statutes affecting a single branch of our transportation system.

Our Federal and state laws are increasing at the rate of about ten thousand a year. Thing of the New York policeman who carries in his pockets a list of the sixteen thousand ordinances and regulations which he is expected to enforce...

Our zeal for the making of laws has been matched by our lack of success in enforcing them...

Much has been written upon the ways of securing a better enforcement of the laws of the land. But the first essential step in that direction, as I see it, must be a reorientation in the mind of the ordinary citizen...

Party Affiliations Inherited

Let me invite attention to another aspect of our political life and to some widespread misconceptions relating to it namely, the party system. Nowhere does the fundamentalist character of our political creed disclose itself more plainly than here. A political party is commonly defined as a large group of men and women who profess allegiance to common principles and who think alike on public questions. We are asked to believe, in fact, that voters choose a political party as the outcome of their own thought and reflection. In reality this is very seldom the case. Far more often the voter's allegiance to a political party is the result of his ancestry, or his occupation, of his personal associations, or something else that is largely irrele-