like the sunlight, or at least as existing like a
universally accepted custom observed by everyone. It was five hundred
years before the notion crept into the minds, even of the members of the
British Parliaments, that they could make a new law. What they supposed
they did, and what they were understood by the people to do, was merely
to declare the law, as it was then and as it had been from time
immemorial; the notion always being--and the farther back you go and the
more simple the people are, the more they have that notion--that their
free laws and customs were something which came from the beginning of
the world, which they always held, which were immutable, no more to be
changed than the forces of nature; and that no Parliament, under the
free Angelo-Saxon government or later under the Norman kings who tried
to make them unfree, no king could ever make a law but could only
declare what the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is _jus
dare_, and _jus dicere_. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the
Parliament never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I have
said, not only what it was then but what it had been, as they supposed,
for thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make new
laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament.

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.

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 invention that is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon
people.

I am quite sure that all the American people when they think of law in
the sense I am now speaking of, even when they are not thinking
necessarily of statute law, do mean, nevertheless, a law which is
enforced by somebody with power, somebody with a big stick