of 1897 of the State of Kentucky say on their title-page that they are an authorized compilation approved by the Supreme Court, but the form of approval of the Supreme Court of Kentucky runs as follows:  “Although we consider this duty not lawfully imposed upon us,” they say that, so far as they have observed, they “detect no errors in the compilation and it seems to have been properly done.”  Of how much value such approval would be in case there turned out to be a discrepancy between the compilation and the original statute, I leave to the lawyers to judge.  The compiled laws of New Mexico of the same year, made by the solicitor-general, contain an amusing statement under his own signature, that he believes “a large part of the laws he there prints are either obsolete or have actually been repealed by certain later statutes,” but he, as it were, shovels them in, in the hope that some of them may be good!

The commissioners of the State of North Dakota go still farther.  Their code of 1895 bears a statement that it is, by authority of law, “brought to date” by the commissioners, who go on to say that they have compared the codes of other States and have added and incorporated many other laws taken from such codes of other States, apparently because the commissioners thought them of value!  One must really ask any first-year student of constitutional legislation what he thinks of that statement, not only of its constitutionality, but of its audacity.  Finally, the State of South Dakota says, in its statutes of 1899, what I quoted at the beginning—­that “all the laws contained in the book are to be considered as admissible in evidence,” but not conclusive of their own authenticity or correct statement.

We now come to the third, and, from the point of view of the believer in statutes, probably the worst class of all.  That is to say, States which have no official or authorized compilation whatever and which rely entirely upon the enterprise of money-making publishers to make a book which correctly prints the laws, and all the laws, of the State in question.  For one State, at least, such a compilation was made by a few industrious newspaper correspondents at Washington!  The States and Territories that are in this cheerful condition are, as I have said:  New York (in part) the Territory of Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana—­that is to say, there has been no official revision since 1881 and everybody, in fact, uses a privately prepared digest—­Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and West Virginia (fourteen in all).  Besides this, there are other States such as Wisconsin and Indiana, already mentioned, where there is no official recent revision, so that everybody depends upon a private compilation, which is the only one procurable.