stick, or toy, or seat, and the others must respect that property.  This I merely use as an illustration to show how simple the notion of law was among our ancestors in England fifteen hundred years ago, and how it had grown up with them, of course, from many centuries, but in much the same way that the notion of custom or law grows up among children.  The English had acquired naturally, but with the tradition of centuries, the notion of law a sexisting; and that brings us to the next point.

Here again we are so confused with our modern notions of law that it is very important not to be misled by them at the beginning.  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.  They mean a law, an ordinance, an order or dictate addressed to them by a sovereign, or by at least a power of some sort; and they mean an ordinance which if they break they are going to suffer for, either in person or in property.  In other words, they have a notion of law as a written command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, or at least by one of the departments of government to the citizen.  Now, that, I must caution you, is in the first place rather a modern notion of law, quite modern in England; it is really Roman, and wasn’t law as it was understood by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors.  He didn’t think of law as a thing written, addressed to him by the king.  Neither did he necessarily think of it as a thing which had any definite punishment attached or any code attached, any sanction, as we call it, or thing which enforces the law; a penalty, or fine, or imprisonment.  There are just as good “sanctions” for law outside of the sanctions that our people usually think of as there are inside of them; and often very much better.  For instance, the sanction of a strong custom.  Take any example you like; there are many States where marriage between blacks and whites is not made unlawful, but where practically it is made tremendously unlawful by the force of public opinion.  Take the case of debts of honor, so-called, debts of gambling; they are paid far more universally than ordinary commercial debts, even by the same people; but there is no law enforcing them—­there is no sanction for the collection of gambling debts.  And take any custom that grows up.  We know how strong our customs in college are.  Take the mere custom of a club table; no one dares or ventures to supplant the members at that table.  That kind of sanction is just as good a law as a law made by statute and imposing five or ten dollars penalty or a week’s imprisonment.  And judges or juries recognize those things as laws, just as much as they do statute laws; when all other laws are lacking, our courts will ask what is the “custom of the trade.”  These be laws; and are often better enforced than