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