it should be
justified by custom, experiment, has been forgotten. And here is the
need and the value of this our study; for the changes that are being
made by new legislation in this country are probably more important
to-day than anything that is being done by the executive or the
judiciary--the other two departments of the government.

But before coming down to our great mass of legislation here it will
be wise to consider the early English legislation, especially that
part which is alive to-day, or which might be alive to-day. I
mentioned one moment ago thirty pages as possibly containing the bulk
of it. I once attempted to make an abstract of such legislation in
early England as is significant to us to-day in this country;[1] not
the merely political legislation, for ours is a sociological study.
We are concerned with those statutes which affect private citizens,
individual rights, men and women in their lives and businesses; not
matters of state, of the king and the commons, or the constitution of
government. Except incidentally, we shall not go into executive or
political questions, but the sociological--I wish there were some
simpler word for it--let us say, the _human_ legislation; legislation
that concerns not the government, the king, or the state, but each man
in his relations to every other; that deals with property, marriage,
divorce, private rights, labor, the corporations, combinations,
trusts, taxation, rates, police power, and the other great questions
of the day, and indeed of all time.

[Footnote 1: See "Federal and State Constitutions," book II, chap. 2.]

Had it not been for the Conquest, it would hardly have been necessary
to have enacted the legislation of the first two or three centuries at
all. Its object mainly was political, that is, to enforce Saxon law
from Norman kings. No change was made, nothing new was added. There
was, however, a little early Saxon legislation before the Conquest.
The best compilation is contained in Stubbs's "Selected Charters." He
says that the earliest English written laws contained amendments of
older unwritten customs, or qualifications of those customs, when they
were gradually wearing out of popular recollection. Such documents are
generally obscure. They require for their elucidation a knowledge
of the customs they were intended to amend. That is as I told you:
everybody was supposed to know the law, and early written statutes
were either mere compilations of