I therefore urged before the National Association of State Libraries, at their annual meeting of 1909, that they should use their influence with the various State governments at least—­“1, that all revisions be authenticated, authorized, and published by the State; 2, that the annual laws be separated, public from private, and be printed by numbered chapters arranged either chronologically or topically; 3, that the indexes be arranged under the forty general heads used by the New York State Library in its annual digest, with such additional heads as may, perhaps, prove necessary in some States, such as, for instance, Louisiana, which has subjects and titles of jurisprudence not known to the ordinary common-law States; 4, that the constitutions be printed with the laws; 5, that every State, under a law, employ a permanent, paid parliamentary or legislative draftsman whose duty it shall be to recast, at least in matters of style and arrangement, all acts before they are passed to be engrossed.”

Any private member introducing a bill can, of course, avail himself of the draftsman’s services before the bill is originally drawn.  His advice may be required by the legislature or by legislative committees on the question whether the proposed legislation is necessary, that is to say, whether it is not covered by laws previously existing.  It shall be his duty then to edit the laws, arrange them for publication, and to authenticate by his signature the volumes of the annual laws.  One person is better than two or three for such work, but he should be paid a very large salary so that he can afford to make it his life work.  He should be appointed for a very long term and should have ample clerical assistance.  It should also be his duty to correspond and exchange information with similar officials in other States.  In other words, he with his assistants should be the legislative reference department.  These recommendations were duly referred to the Committee on Uniformity in preparation of session laws.

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At some risk of wearying the reader I have attempted superficially to cover a very extensive field.  I started with quoting Blackstone’s remark that there is no other science in which so little education is supposed to be necessary as that of legislation.  These words were penned by him more than one hundred and fifty years ago and there is still no book upon this subject; the books on Government, Parliamentary Law, and Hermeneutics concerning respectively the source, the procedure, and the interpretation of legislation, not the content thereof.  I can but hope to have called attention to the immense importance of this subject, particularly in our representative democracy, and I will beg my readers who have been patient with me to the end to reflect for more than a moment on the extraordinarily novel state of things that this modern notion of the legislative function brings about.  It is a commonplace of historical writers to open their