I

THE ENGLISH IDEA OF LAW


My object in the lectures upon which this work is based was to give
some notion of the problems of the time (in this country, of course,
particularly) which are confronting legislators primarily, political
parties in the second place, but finally all good citizens. The
treatment was as untechnical as possible. The lectures themselves were
for men who meant to go into business, for journalists, or political
students; a general view--an elemental, broad general view--of the
problems that confront legislation to-day. So is the book not one for
lawyers alone; it seeks to cover both what has been accomplished
by law-making in the past, and what is now being adopted or even
proposed; the history of statutes of legislation by the people as
distinct from "judge-made" law; how far legislatures can cure the
evils that confront the state or the individual, and what the future
of American legislation is likely to be. Constitutional difficulties
I had merely mentioned, as there was another course of lectures on
American constitutional principles, which supplemented it.[1] In those
I tried to show what we _cannot_ do by legislation; in these I merely
discussed what had been done, and tried to show what we are now doing.
What we may _not_ do may sound, perhaps, like a narrow field; but the
growth of constitutional law in this country is so wide--in the first
place including all the English Constitution, and more than that,
so many principles of human liberty that have been adopted into our
Constitution, either at the time it was adopted, or which have crept
into it through the Fourteenth Amendment, with all the innovations
of State constitutions as well--that really the discussion of what