that ultimately resulted in bringing the whole free English law back.  Thus, early law was custom; Anglo-Saxon law was free custom; the English lost it under the Conquest; and they got it back because the first Norman kings had to call the council together, which grew into Parliament, which then, in voting their aids or taxes, demanded their “old liberties”; and finally, after getting Magna Charta, after getting all their old Saxon liberties back, by easy transition, they began to say:  “We would make certain regulations, ordinances, laws of our own”; though we have not yet got to the time where the notion of making new law, as a statute is now understood, existed.

II

EARLY ENGLISH LEGISLATION AND MAGNA CHARTA

Parliament began avowedly to make new laws in the thirteenth century; but the number of such laws concerning private relations—­private civil law—­remained, for centuries, small.  You could digest them all into a book of thirty or forty pages.  And even to Charles the First all the statutes of the realm fill but five volumes.  The legislation under Cromwell was all repealed; but the bulk, both under him and after, was far greater.  For legislation seems to be considered a democratic idea; “judge-made law” to be thought aristocratic.  And so in our republic; especially as, during the Revolution, the sole power was vested in our legislative bodies, and we tried to cover a still wider field, with democratic legislatures dominated by radicals.  Thus at first the American people got the notion of law-making; of the making of new law, by legislatures, frequently elected; and in that most radical period of all, from about 1830 to 1860, the time of “isms” and reforms—­full of people who wanted to legislate and make the world good by law, with a chance to work in thirty different States—­the result has been that the bulk of legislation in this country, in the first half of the last century, is probably one thousandfold the entire law-making of England for the five centuries preceding.  And we have by no means got over it yet; probably the output of legislation in this country to-day is as great as it ever was.  If any citizen thinks that anything is wrong, he, or she (as it is almost more likely to be), rushes to some legislature to get a new law passed.  Absolutely different is this idea from the old English notion of law as something already existing.  They have forgotten that completely, and have the modern American notion of law, as a ready-made thing, a thing made to-day to meet the emergency of to-morrow.  They have gotten over the notion that any parliament, or legislature, or sovereign, should only sign the law—­and I say sign advisedly because he doesn’t enact it, doesn’t create it, but signs a written statement of law already existing; all idea that 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.