rivate laws are lumped together, although in a few they
are indexed separately. Most of the States to-day, including all the
"code" States, adopt the topical system of arrangement, as, indeed,
must be the case in anything that might, by any possibility, be called
a code, and even a general "revision" of the statutes will naturally
fall into chapters covering certain subjects. A few States, as I have
said, cling to the crude alphabetical system, and quite a number have
no discernible system whatever. In some States the annual laws are
arranged by number, in some by date of passage, and in some apparently
according to the sweet will of the printer. In those States which do
not arrange them or entitle them by date of passage we have to depend
on the crude and dangerous system of citation by page. Acts of
Congress are sometimes cited by date of passage, sometimes more
formally by volume and number of the Statutes at Large, and more often
than either, probably, by the popular name of the statute, such as the
"Sherman Act," the "Hepburn Act," or the "Interstate Commerce Law."

It seems to me we should recommend one system. That for the codes or
general revisions should certainly be topical. That of the annual laws
may either be topical or chronological, but the statutes, in whatever
order they are printed, should be _numbered_ and cited by number. No
alphabetical arrangement ever should be permitted.

As to indexing we should urge upon State legislatures, secretaries
of State, and official draftsmen (when we get any) that the very
excellent system contained in the New York Year Book of Legislation
should be adopted for all volumes of State laws. It is as bad for the
index to be too big as to be too little, and it does not follow that
the good draftsman is a good indexer. The index to our Revised Laws
of Massachusetts is contained in one large separate volume of 570
double-column pages. To look for a statute in the index is just about
as bad as to look for it in the revision itself. The most important
point of all is the proper choice of subject titles. Laws should
be indexed under the general subject or branch of the science of
jurisprudence, or the subject-matter to which they belong, not too
technically and not too much according to mere logic. For example, any
lawyer or any student of civics who wished to learn about the labor
laws of a State, whether, for instance, it had a nine-hour law or not,
would look in the index u