subject of statute-making is not thought difficult; it is supposed
to be perfectly capable of discussion by any one of our State
legislators, with or without legal training; and sometimes with
lamentable consequences. For the subject is of the most immense
importance, now that the bulk of all our law is, or is supposed to be,
statutes.

In order to understand, therefore, what a statute is, and why it has
grown important to consider statute-making, it is necessary to have
some knowledge of the meaning of the word _law_, and of the origin
both of representative government and of legislatures, before we come
to statutes, as we understand them; for parliaments existed centuries
before they made statutes as we now use this word. _Statutes_ with
us are recent; _legislatures_ making statutes are recent everywhere;
legislatures themselves are fairly recent; that is, they date only
from the end of the Dark Ages, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Representative government itself is supposed, by most scholars, to be
the one invention that is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people.

And there is another invention--if we can call it one--to my mind of
far greater importance, which I should urge was also peculiar to the
Anglo-Saxon people; that is, the invention or the idea of personal
liberty; which is understood, and always has been understood, by
Anglo-Saxons in a sense in which it never existed before, so far as I
know, in any people in the history of the world. It is that notion of
personal liberty which was the cause of representative government, not
representative government that was the cause of personal liberty. In
other words, the people did not get up a parliament for the sake of
having that parliament enact laws securing personal liberty. It was
the result of a condition of personal liberty which prevailed among