without any instruction, and it is quite singular how soon customs
will grow up, and it is also quite singular and a thing that always
surprises the socialist and communist, that about the earliest concept
at which they _will_ arrive is that of private property! They will
soon get a notion that one child owns a stick, or toy, or seat,
and the others must respect that property. This I merely use as an
illustration to show how simple the notion of law was among our
ancestors in England fifteen hundred years ago, and how it had grown
up with them, of course, from many centuries, but in much the same way
that the notion of custom or law grows up among children. The English
had acquired naturally, but with the tradition of centuries, the
notion of law a _sexisting_; and that brings us to the next point.

Here again we are so confused with our modern notions of law that it
is very important not to be misled by them at the beginning. I am
quite sure that all the American people when they think of law in
the sense I am now speaking of, even when they are not thinking
necessarily of statute law, do mean, nevertheless, a law which is
enforced by somebody with power, somebody with a big stick. They
mean a law, an ordinance, an order or dictate addressed to them by
a sovereign, or by at least a power of some sort; and they mean an
ordinance which if they break they are going to suffer for, either in
person or in property. In other words, they have a notion of law as a
written command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, or at least
by one of the departments of government to the citizen. Now, that, I
must caution you, is in the first place rather a modern notion of law,
quite modern in England; it is really Roman, and wasn't law as it was
understood by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He didn't think of law as
a thing written, addressed to him by the king. Neither did he
necessarily think of it as a thing which had any definite punishment