tremendous increase in legislative output, most notable in
the States of the United States, did not begin with us at once. For
some forty or fifty years after the Revolution our State legislatures
made as little constructive legislation as did the Parliament of
George III. It was with the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth
century that the great increase began. It seems to have taken
democratic legislatures some fifty years to become conscious that they
had this new unlimited power, and not only that they possessed it but
were expected to exercise it; the power of making absolutely new laws,
statutes which did not exist before as law, either by the common law
or by the custom of the people. It is true, our ancestors had some
taste of radical legislation during the Revolution, and the checks of
the State constitutions were adopted for that reason; but subject only
to this limitation, it was the first modern experiment in popular
legislation. The great wave of radical law-making that began with the
moral movements--the prohibition movement, the anti-slavery movement,
and the women's rights movement--of the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, lasted down until the Civil War. After that
there was a conservative reaction, followed by a new radical wave in
reconstruction times, which ended with another conservative reaction
at the time of the first election of President Cleveland. Since then,
new moral or social movements, mainly those concerned with the desire
to benefit labor and repress the trusts, with the desire to protect
women and children, seem to have brought up a new radical wave, the
progress of which has hardly ended yet. Before the Civil War, the
women's rights movement and the anti-slavery movement always worked
together. They were in great part composed of the same persons. In
fact, the historical origin of the women's suffrage movement was a
large abolition meeting held in England, but attended by many women
delegates from America, where they excluded a leading American woman
abolitionist and would only allow her husband to take her seat in her
place. We shall, of course, consider this precise question later, and
pause now merely to note the fact that with the anti-slavery movement,
ending with the adoption of the war amendments and the women's
suffrage movement, ceasing to progress soon after, there came the
period of conservative reaction, or, at least, of quiescence, which
lasted down to the re