presentative
democracy, and I will beg my readers who have been patient with me to
the end to reflect for more than a moment on the extraordinarily novel
state of things that this modern notion of the legislative function
brings about. It is a commonplace of historical writers to open their
first chapter by calling attention to the difference made by steel and
electricity, to the fact that it took longer to get from Boston to
Washington in 1776 than it does to-day from Maine to California
and back; that it took longer even for the rural legislator in the
Connecticut Valley to get to his State Capitol than it does to-day
to go from there to Washington. But no one, I think, has ever called
attention to the enormous differences in living, in business, in
political temper between the days (which practically lasted until the
last century) when a citizen, a merchant, an employer of labor, or a
laboring man, still more a corporation or association, and lastly, a
man even in his most intimate relations, the husband and the father,
well knew the law as _familiar_ law, a law with which he had grown up,
and to which he had adapted his life, his marriage, the education
of his children, his business career and his entrance into public
life--and these days of to-day, when all those doing business under a
corporate firm primarily, but also those doing business at all;
all owners of property, all employers of labor, all bankers or
manufacturers or consumers; all citizens, in their gravest and their
least actions, also must look into their newspapers every morning to
make sure that the whole law of life has not been changed for them by
a statute passed overnight; when not only no lawyer may maintain an
office without the most recent day-by-day bulletins on legislation,
but may not advise on the simplest proposition of marriage or divorce,
of a wife's share in a husband's property, of her freedom of contract,
without sending not only to his own State legislature, but for the
most recent statute of any other State which may have a bearing on
the situation. Moreover, these statutes, which at any moment may
revolutionize a man's liberty or his property, are not as they were in
old times--a mere codification, or attempt at the best expression of
a law already existing and well "understanded of the people"; but may
and probably will represent a complete reversal of experience, an
absolute alteration of human relations, a paradox of all that ha