ears. It would be a fair estimate
that they average five hundred statutes a year, which would make,
roughly speaking, twenty-five thousand annual laws. It has been well
doubted by students of modern democracy, by Lecky and Carlyle, if this
immense mass of legislation is a benefit at all. Carlyle, indeed, is
recorded to have taken Emerson down to the House of Commons and showed
him that legislative body in full function, only taking him away when
he was sufficiently exhausted, with the query whether Emerson, though
a Unitarian, did not now believe in a personal devil. Administrative
law-making for the machinery of government there must always be, but
for the rest, if we rely on the common law and its natural development
alone, our condition will be far less hopeless than most of us might
imagine. Indeed, as we shall so often find, it is the very ease and
frequency of legislation that has caused our courts and law-makers
to forego the well-tried doctrines of the common law. Many of our
statutes but re-enact it; when they go beyond it, it is frequently to
blunder. Moreover, it is a commonplace that no law is successful that
does not fairly express the thought and customs, the conditions, of
the mass of the people. Professor Jenks of Oxford applies to all other
legislation the term "fancy legislation," or, as we might say, freak
legislation--the caprices and desires of the present legislature or
their constituents, carried immediately into law; and we may say at
the outset that such legislation has rarely proved wise, and
hardly ever effective. It is needless to state that many modern
statutes--like prohibition laws, for instance--are passed for that
very reason. Yet whatever the fact may have been in the past, there is
no doubt that for the future, legislation by the people, constructive
law-making at the popular behest, is the great new fact of
Anglo-American civilization. There has just been brought out an
immense index, under the auspices of the British Government, called
"The Legislation of the Empire, being a Survey of the Legislative
Enactments of the British Dominions, from 1897 to 1907." This
work fills four huge volumes, and gives but the briefest possible
index-headings of the statutes of the British Empire for that period.
Our excellent "Index of Legislation," published by the New York State
Library, contains about six hundred pages, and even this is hardly
more than an index, as the title suggests.

Now, this