All the authorities appear to be agreed that there is no prototype for what seems to us such a very simple thing as representation, representative government, among the Greeks or the Romans, or any of the older civilizations of which we have knowledge.  It is very surprising that it is so, and I am always expecting that some one will discover, either in the Achaian League or somewhere, that it is not so, that there is a prototype; but there doesn’t seem to be any regular system of representative government until you get to Anglo-Saxon peoples.  So that was the second stage of the Witenagemot, and then it properly begins to be called the Great Assembly or Council of the people.  This representative assembly was then not only legislative, it was also executive, to some extent, and entirely judicial; for we are a thousand years before the notion of the threefold division of government has occurred to any one.  The early Saxon Witenagemot, as later the Norman kings tried to, did unite all three functions in themselves.  Their main function was judicial; for the reason that there was very little notion as yet of legislation, in a people or tribe whose simple customs and simple property demanded very few laws, where the first remedy for any man for any attack on his family or property was the remedy of his own good, right hand.  When you really only got into a lawsuit, at least as concerning property, as a result of a killing of somebody or other, albeit in defence of one’s own chattels, it is obvious that there need not be much legislation; the laws were too well known, the unwritten law too well enforced.  It probably would have surprised the early Englishman if he had been told that either he or anybody else didn’t know the law—­still more that there was ever any need for any parliament or assembly to tell him what it was.  They all knew the law, and they all knew that they knew the law, and the law was a thing that they knew as naturally as they knew fishing and hunting.  They had grown up into it.  It never occurred to them as an outside thing.

[Footnote 1:  Gneist, “The English Parliament,” and Skottowe, “History of Parliament,” perhaps best summarize this view.]

So it has been found that where you take children, modern children, at least boys who are sons of educated parents, and put them in large masses by themselves, they will, without apparently any reading, rapidly invent a notion of law; that is, they will invent a certain set of customs which are the same thing to them as law, and which indeed are the same as law.  They have tried in Johns Hopkins University experiments among children, to leave them entirely alone, without any instruction, and it is quite singular how soon customs will grow up, and it is also quite singular and a thing that always surprises the socialist and communist, that about the earliest concept at which they will arrive is that of private property!  They will soon get a notion that one child owns a