II

EARLY ENGLISH LEGISLATION AND MAGNA CHARTA


Parliament began avowedly to make new laws in the thirteenth century;
but the number of such laws concerning private relations--private
civil law--remained, for centuries, small. You could digest them all
into a book of thirty or forty pages. And even to Charles the First
all the statutes of the realm fill but five volumes. The legislation
under Cromwell was all repealed; but the bulk, both under him and
after, was far greater. For legislation seems to be considered a
democratic idea; "judge-made law" to be thought aristocratic. And so
in our republic; especially as, during the Revolution, the sole power
was vested in our legislative bodies, and we tried to cover a still
wider field, with democratic legislatures dominated by radicals. Thus
at first the American people got the notion of law-making; of the
making of new law, by legislatures, frequently elected; and in that
most radical period of all, from about 1830 to 1860, the time of
"isms" and reforms--full of people who wanted to legislate and make
the world good by law, with a chance to work in thirty different
States--the result has been that the bulk of legislation in this
country, in the first half of the last century, is probably one
thousandfold the entire law-making of England for the five centuries
preceding. And we have by no means got over it yet; probably the
output of legislation in this country to-day is as great as it ever
was. If any citizen thinks that anything is wrong, he, or she (as it
is almost more likely to be), rushes to some legislature to get a new