_cannot_ be done by statute takes one almost over the entire range of
constitutional law and even into the discussion of what cannot be done
in a free country or under ordinary principles of human liberty.

[Footnote 1: "The Law of the Federal and State Constitutions of
the United States," Boston Book Company, 1908. "The American
Constitution," Scribners, New York, 1907.]

How many of us have ever formulated in our minds what _law_ means? I
am inclined to think that the most would give a meaning that was never
the meaning of the word _law_, at least until a very few years
ago; that is, the meaning which alone is the subject of this book,
_statute_ law. The notion of law as a _statute_, a thing passed by a
legislature, a thing enacted, made new by representative assembly, is
perfectly modern, and yet it has so thoroughly taken possession of our
minds, and particularly of the American mind (owing to the forty-eight
legislatures that we have at work, besides the National Congress,
every year, and to the fact that they try to do a great 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