But before coming down to our great mass of legislation here it will be wise to consider the early English legislation, especially that part which is alive to-day, or which might be alive to-day.  I mentioned one moment ago thirty pages as possibly containing the bulk of it.  I once attempted to make an abstract of such legislation in early England as is significant to us to-day in this country;[1] not the merely political legislation, for ours is a sociological study.  We are concerned with those statutes which affect private citizens, individual rights, men and women in their lives and businesses; not matters of state, of the king and the commons, or the constitution of government.  Except incidentally, we shall not go into executive or political questions, but the sociological—­I wish there were some simpler word for it—­let us say, the human legislation; legislation that concerns not the government, the king, or the state, but each man in his relations to every other; that deals with property, marriage, divorce, private rights, labor, the corporations, combinations, trusts, taxation, rates, police power, and the other great questions of the day, and indeed of all time.

[Footnote 1:  See “Federal and State Constitutions,” book II, chap. 2.]

Had it not been for the Conquest, it would hardly have been necessary to have enacted the legislation of the first two or three centuries at all.  Its object mainly was political, that is, to enforce Saxon law from Norman kings.  No change was made, nothing new was added.  There was, however, a little early Saxon legislation before the Conquest.  The best compilation is contained in Stubbs’s “Selected Charters.”  He says that the earliest English written laws contained amendments of older unwritten customs, or qualifications of those customs, when they were gradually wearing out of popular recollection.  Such documents are generally obscure.  They require for their elucidation a knowledge of the customs they were intended to amend.  That is as I told you:  everybody was supposed to know the law, and early written statutes were either mere compilations of already existing law, slight modifications of them, or else in the nature of imposing various penalties—­all of which assume that you know the law already.  When they attempted codification, which they did about twice before the Conquest (especially under Edward the Confessor, for that reason he is called the Father of English law, the English Justinian, because he was enough of a civilian to understand what a code was), King Edward made the attempt to get a certain amount of law written out; but even that would be very unintelligible if you tried to read it, for he assumed that one knew it all already, and it also is mainly in the nature of imposing penalties, not stating the law as it was.  However, that is called the first English code.  All the Saxon laws Dr. Stubbs could find fill only twenty-two pages of his small book; and he says that English law, from its first