ten instrument, you must understand that
_people_ and their _institutions_ before you understand the writing.
You cannot separate a people and their history from a written
constitution which is only a part of that history. The same words by
one people may have a different meaning used by another people. Any
writing can only be an index to the institutions of a people.

A people's _institutions_ are the soul of the written and unwritten
law. You must understand the French people, their history, and their
institutions, before you can understand their written constitution.
You must understand the American people, our history, and our
institutions, before you can understand our Constitution.

I have thus enlarged upon our institutional law to give young men a
hint of its possibilities. Before this century closes, the greatest
law book in all the literature of jurisprudence will be produced upon
the subject of our institutional law. The materials are as plentiful
as the history of our race, the demand as insistent as our daily life.

Great law books all written! Nonsense. As yet we have had only the
turgid descriptions of the toilsome and halting progress of justice
through the ages--that is all we have had, compared with the noble
volume that will be written, giving mankind the high, clear, and
simple thinking of a greater Blackstone and a wiser Kent. It may be
that this generation will produce this immortal judicial author; it
may be that you, young man, are he. At least one thing is sure--the
work is there waiting for the workman.

But if you do not feel equipped for this monumental effort, there are
other phases of the law more imminent, if not so comprehensive, in
each of which there is opportunity and demand for original work.

For example, it is clear to all that the laws of marriage and divorce
must be made rational and uniform throughout the Nation; that the laws
respecting corporations are inappropriate, inadequate, and unjust,
both to corporations and to the public--that they do not measure up to
the present complex conditions; that the laws respecting commercial
paper need to be systematized.

It is absurd, too, that a farmer living on one side of an imaginary
state line which separates his farm and the state in which it is
located from that of his neighbor living on the other side of the
imaginary line in another state, should have to deal with his neighbor
as if he were a foreigner in a foreign land and u