Before approaching the actual field of American legislation, it may be wise to make a few general statements concerning it.  It was some fifty years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution before it began in great bulk, but to-day we find in the States alone forty-six legislative bodies, and two of Territories, besides the Federal Congress and the limited legislatures of our insular possessions.  Nearly all of these turn out laws every year; even when the legislatures meet biennially, they frequently have an annual session.  Only in one or two Southern States have recent constitutions restricted them to once in four years.  It would be a fair estimate that they average five hundred statutes a year, which would make, roughly speaking, twenty-five thousand annual laws.  It has been well doubted by students of modern democracy, by Lecky and Carlyle, if this immense mass of legislation is a benefit at all.  Carlyle, indeed, is recorded to have taken Emerson down to the House of Commons and showed him that legislative body in full function, only taking him away when he was sufficiently exhausted, with the query whether Emerson, though a Unitarian, did not now believe in a personal devil.  Administrative law-making for the machinery of government there must always be, but for the rest, if we rely on the common law and its natural development alone, our condition will be far less hopeless than most of us might imagine.  Indeed, as we shall so often find, it is the very ease and frequency of legislation that has caused our courts and law-makers to forego the well-tried doctrines of the common law.  Many of our statutes but re-enact it; when they go beyond it, it is frequently to blunder.  Moreover, it is a commonplace that no law is successful that does not fairly express the thought and customs, the conditions, of the mass of the people.  Professor Jenks of Oxford applies to all other legislation the term “fancy legislation,” or, as we might say, freak legislation—­the caprices and desires of the present legislature or their constituents, carried immediately into law; and we may say at the outset that such legislation has rarely proved wise, and hardly ever effective.  It is needless to state that many modern statutes—­like prohibition laws, for instance—­are passed for that very reason.  Yet whatever the fact may have been in the past, there is no doubt that for the future, legislation by the people, constructive law-making at the popular behest, is the great new fact of Anglo-American civilization.  There has just been brought out an immense index, under the auspices of the British Government, called “The Legislation of the Empire, being a Survey of the Legislative Enactments of the British Dominions, from 1897 to 1907.”  This work fills four huge volumes, and gives but the briefest possible index-headings of the statutes of the British Empire for that period.  Our excellent “Index of Legislation,” published by the New York State Library, contains about six hundred pages, and even this is hardly more than an index, as the title suggests.