deal to deserve their pay in the way of enacting laws), that statutes have assumed in our minds the main bulk of the concept of law as we formulate it to ourselves.  I guess that the ordinary newspaper reader, when he talks about “laws” or reads about “law,” thinks of statutes; but that is a perfectly modern concept; and the thing itself, even as we now understand it, is perfectly modern.  There were no statutes within the present meaning of the word more than a very few centuries ago.  But statutes are precisely the subject of this book; legislation, the tendency of statute-making, the spirit of statutes that we have made, that we are making, and that we are likely to make, or that are now being proposed; so it is concerned, in a sense, with the last and most recent and most ready-made of all legal or political matters.  The subject of statute-making is not thought difficult; it is supposed to be perfectly capable of discussion by any one of our State legislators, with or without legal training; and sometimes with lamentable consequences.  For the subject is of the most immense importance, now that the bulk of all our law is, or is supposed to be, statutes.

In order to understand, therefore, what a statute is, and why it has grown important to consider statute-making, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the meaning of the word law, and of the origin both of representative government and of legislatures, before we come to statutes, as we understand them; for parliaments existed centuries before they made statutes as we now use this word. Statutes with us are recent; legislatures making statutes are recent everywhere; legislatures themselves are fairly recent; that is, they date only from the end of the Dark Ages, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries.  Representative government itself is supposed, by most scholars, to be the one invention that is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people.

And there is another invention—­if we can call it one—­to my mind of far greater importance, which I should urge was also peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people; that is, the invention or the idea of personal liberty; which is understood, and always has been understood, by Anglo-Saxons in a sense in which it never existed before, so far as I know, in any people in the history of the world.  It is that notion of personal liberty which was the cause of representative government, not representative government that was the cause of personal liberty.  In other words, the people did not get up a parliament for the sake of having that parliament enact laws securing personal liberty.  It was the result of a condition of personal liberty which prevailed among them and in their laws that resulted in representative government, and in the institution of a legislature, making, as we now would say, the laws; though a thousand years ago they never said that a legislature made laws, they only said that it told what the laws were.  This is another