hich seem to be passing under positive enactment and out
of the unformulated control of the mores. When an enactment is made
there is a sacrifice of the elasticity and automatic self-adaptation of
custom, but an enactment is specific and is provided with sanctions.
Enactments come into use when conscious purposes are formed, and it is
believed that specific devices can be framed by which to realize such
purposes in the society. Then also prohibitions take the place of
taboos, and punishments are planned to be deterrent rather than
revengeful. The mores of different societies, or of different ages, are
characterized by greater of less readiness and confidence in regard to
the use of positive enactments for the realization of societal purposes.

2. Common Law and Statute Law[274]

It probably would have surprised the early Englishman if he had been
told that either he or anybody else did not know the law--still more
that there was ever any need for any parliament or assembly to tell him
what it was. They all knew the law, and they all knew that they knew
the law, and the law was a thing that they knew as naturally as they
knew fishing and hunting. They had grown up into it. It never occurred
to them as an outside thing.

So it has been found that where you take children, modern children, at
least boys who are sons of educated parents, and put them in large
masses by themselves, they will, without apparently any reading, rapidly
invent a notion of law; that is, they will invent a certain set of
customs which are the same thing to them as law, and which indeed are
the same as law. They have tried in Johns Hopkins University experiments
among children, to leave them entirely alone, 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 "law" of the free Angelo-Saxon people was regarded as a thing
existing by itself,