ned to think that the most would give a meaning that was never
the meaning of the word _law_, at least until a very few years
ago; that is, the meaning which alone is the subject of this book,
_statute_ law. The notion of law as a _statute_, a thing passed by a
legislature, a thing enacted, made new by representative assembly, is
perfectly modern, and yet it has so thoroughly taken possession of our
minds, and particularly of the American mind (owing to the forty-eight
legislatures that we have at work, besides the National Congress,
every year, and to the fact that they try to do a great deal to
deserve their pay in the way of enacting laws), that statutes have
assumed in our minds the main bulk of the concept of law as we
formulate it to ourselves. I guess that the ordinary newspaper reader,
when he talks about "laws" or reads about "law," thinks of statutes;
but that is a perfectly modern concept; and the thing itself, even
as we now understand it, is perfectly modern. There were no statutes
within the present meaning of the word more than a very few centuries
ago. But statutes are precisely the subject of this book; legislation,
the tendency of statute-making, the spirit of statutes that we have
made, that we are making, and that we are likely to make, or that are
now being proposed; so it is concerned, in a sense, with the last and
most recent and most ready-made of all legal or political matters. The
subject of statute-making is not thought difficult; it is supposed
to be perfectly capable of discussion by any one of our State
legislators, with or without legal training; and sometimes with
lamentable consequences. For the subject is of the most immense
importance, now that the bulk of all our law is, or is supposed to be,
statutes.

In order to understand, therefore, what a statute is, and why it has
grown important to consider statute-making, it is necessary to have
some knowledge of the meaning of the word _law_, and of the origin
both of representative government and of legislatures, before we come
to statutes, as we understand them; for parliaments existed centuries
before they made statutes as we now use this word. _Statutes_ with
us are recent; _legislatures_ making statutes are recent everywhere;
legislatures themselves are fairly recent; that is, they date only
from the end of the Dark Ages, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Representative government itself is supposed, by most scholars, to be
the one in