efore the notion of the
threefold division of government has occurred to any one. The early
Saxon Witenagemot, as later the Norman kings tried to, did unite all
three functions in themselves. Their main function was judicial; for
the reason that there was very little notion as yet of _legislation_,
in a people or tribe whose simple customs and simple property demanded
very few laws, where the first remedy for any man for any attack on
his family or property was the remedy of his own good, right hand.
When you really only got into a lawsuit, at least as concerning
property, as a result of a killing of somebody or other, albeit in
defence of one's own chattels, it is obvious that there need not be
much legislation; the laws were too well known, the unwritten law too
well enforced. It probably would have surprised the early Englishman
if he had been told that either he or anybody else didn't _know_ the
law--still more that there was ever any need for any parliament or
assembly to tell him what it was. They all knew the law, and they all
knew that they knew the law, and the law was a thing that they knew as
naturally as they knew fishing and hunting. They had grown up into it.
It never occurred to them as an outside thing.

[Footnote 1: Gneist, "The English Parliament," and Skottowe, "History
of Parliament," perhaps best summarize this view.]

So it has been found that where you take children, modern children,
at least boys who are sons of educated parents, and put them in large
masses by themselves, they will, without apparently any reading,
rapidly invent a notion of law; that is, they will invent a certain
set of customs which are the same thing to them as law, and which
indeed are the same as law. They have tried in Johns Hopkins
University experiments among children, to leave them entirely alone,
without any instruction, and it is quite singular how soon customs
will grow up, and it is also quite singular and a thing that always
surprises the socialist and communist, that about the earliest concept
at which they _will_ arrive is that of private property! They will
soon get a notion that one child owns a stick, or toy, or seat,
and the others must respect that property. This I merely use as an
illustration to show how simple the notion of law was among our
ancestors in England fifteen hundred years ago, and how it had grown
up with them, of course, from many centuries, but in much the same way
that the notion of custo