plumbers, pedlars, horse-shoers, osteopaths, dentists, veterinary surgeons, accountants, bakers, junk dealers, coal dealers, optometrists, architects, barbers, commission merchants, embalmers, and nurses.  Of course it is a motive to novel or irregular trades to secure a licensing law from the State, for the slight tax insures them protection.  This is the reason that we find common statutes allowing osteopaths, etc., to be licensed.  So far as I have observed, there is no such statute as yet in any State applying to Christian Scientists.

Police regulation for the safety of the public is found nearly entirely in the laws regulating labor, factories, mines, or machinery, and will be accordingly treated in that connection.  Laws protecting the public against fraud, which from earliest times has been a branch of police legislation, have been of late years numerous, principally in connection with the prohibition of dealing in futures or sales on margin, of sales of goods in bulk without due precautions and notice to creditors, of the issue of trading stamps or other device tending to mislead the public.  Some States have prohibited department stores, but this legislation has been held unconstitutional, though the early English labor statutes forbidding to any person more than one trade or mystery will by the historical student be borne in mind.  Usury laws, of course, are still frequent, but decreasing in number with the increasing modern tendency to allow freedom of contract in this as in other matters, except only to such persons as, for instance, pawn-brokers, who peculiarly require police regulation.

Coming to statutes which merely facilitate business as it now exists, by far the most important movement has been the successful work of the State Commissioners on Uniformity of Law in getting their negotiable instrument act passed in nearly all the States, and in several already their uniform law statute on sales, only recommended in 1907.  Some progress has been made in getting a uniform standard of weights and measures, and there is an increasing tendency to prescribe specific weights and markings for packages—­possibly unconstitutional legislation.  Still more important as a change in previously existing law has been the increasing tendency to make documents other than bills and notes negotiable.  Perhaps this is a matter which requires explanation to the lay reader.

The early Anglo-Saxon law could not conceive of ownership of property as distinct from possession, and to their simple minds, when ownership was once acquired it was impossible to divest the owner of his property by any symbolical delivery.  Hence the very early statutes making fraudulent sales or conveyances of property without actual and visible change of possession.  The notion of a symbol, a paper or writing, which should represent that property would probably have impressed them like a spell or charm in a child’s fairy tale.  Even theft with asportation could