The generation of men who formulated the Declaration of Independence and framed the Constitution of the United States are held to be individualists of a pronounced, if not an extreme, type. We accept as being the cardinal principle of their politics, that the government is best which governs least, and we assume as the merit of their legislation that it was always at the minimum of quantity. The protest they made, however, was not against government as such, but against a distant and alien government, which did not derive its powers from the consent of the governed, and especially one which exercised the power of taxation over a people to whom it did not permit representation.

If we compare the statutes of the Colony of Virginia at the outbreak of the Revolution with those of the state at the present day, we find the former much less in volume, but the comparison is worthless unless we consider the difference in the condition of the times. The colony was sparsely settled and its people engaged almost entirely in agricultural pursuits. There were no cities and no large towns. There was in consequence small need for municipal legislation. The plantations along the tidewater and the farms among the foothills were tilled largely by slaves and bondservants and so the labor legislation was simple, and in the modern view, onesided. The barons of the Rappahannock and the Potomac and the gentlemen farmers of the Piedmont sought each to make his establishment as nearly as possible sufficient unto itself. They had some commerce with the mother country, but their relations with each other were chiefly social. But they used the law as much as is now done to promote their interests, and they had as quick a sense of wrong to themselves as have their descendants and were as swift to redress what they felt to be so by legislative enactments.

They passed acts for the encouragement of arts and manufactures and paid bounties to stimulate various productions of the soil. They enacted such laws as they might and deemed needful for the regulation of their foreign commerce. Having occasion at times to borrow money, they protected themselves against the usurer by limitations upon the rates of interest and brokerage. They had laws against the adulteration of such food and drink

as they bought for their own use and inspection laws to maintain the repute upon the market of what they produced for sale. That the vanity of grief might not indulge itself to the point of impoverishment, they authorized the county courts to regulate funeral expenses. A substantial property qualification was required as a condition of suffrage, and only freeholders were eligible to the House of Burgesses. This restriction of political power accounts for the absence of many things from their legislation. We find but little in it relative to schools and eleemosynary institutions, subjects which occupy much space in the present day. They were most active in the field now most strenuously contested. That a business or property when it becomes affected with a public use or interest ceases to be private and is subject to public control, was a prime article of their faith. The tobacco which was the staple of their fields was also the staple of their lawmaking. They regulated how it should be planted and harvested and how it should be prepared for market. Their warehouse regulation went far beyond the present in its assertion of public right. The county court had power to declare a place to be a public landing, and having done this, to require the proprietor to build a storehouse thereon, and the storehouse so built, was by the law, regardless of the volition of the owner, devoted to public use and subjected to public regulation as to the manner of that use and the charges therefor. They sometimes went to law and that they might be well served in the courts, they imposed conditions as to character and learning upon admission to the Bar, and to secure themselves against extortionate charges, they fixed a schedule of fees, more than which the lawyer was forbidden to accept, before the full rendition of services by him, and more than which he could not recover in case of suit.

The planters were not all of them equipped to grind their own grain and some must have recourse to the custom mill and it was, therefore, ordained that "all millers shall well and sufficiently grind the grain brought to their mills, and in due turn as the same shall be brought, and may take for the toll, one eighth part, and no more, of which the remaining part shall be ground into meal; and one sixteenth part, and no more, of that, the remainder

of which shall be ground into hominy or malt." In the statute books which stood upon the shelves of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, there were no laws governing private corporations, banks or insurance companies, for these institutions had no existence in Virginia. Neither were there any laws fixing railroad rates or regulating railroad operation. The common carrier was unknown. The planter traveled in his own conveyance and to keep to the right was the only law of the road he needed to know. But the country was much intersected with streams and to cross these the people were dependent upon ferries, and they prescribed the number of boats and hands to be kept at each and a maximum charge for their service. They might tarry for the night at some mansion on their way, and to avoid question as to the terms upon which they enjoyed its food and shelter, it was enacted that entertainment at a private house, in the absence of an express agreement, should be deemed to be a matter of free hospitality. Constrained sometimes to stop at inns, they empowered and required the justices of the county court "as often as they shall see cause" and at least twice a year, to "set the rates and prices to be paid at all ordinaries within their respective counties for liquors, diet, lodging, provender, stableage, fodder and pasturage," and mine host must set up a copy of these rates, attested by the clerk of the county court," in some public entertaining room in his tavern, not more than six feet above the floor." They provided further for a forfeiture of his license if he should in his house, on the Lord's day or on any other day set apart by public authority for religious worship "suffer any person to tipple or drink any more than is necessary."

It is difficult to conceive of a subject of general interest which they did not bring within the public control, and if in after years there was an extension of the law into new fields, it was not due to any perversion of the early principles, but to the changed conditions of life, and to the fuller growth and more perfect development of those principles. It would be as disparaging to the past, as to the present, to say that it planted the seeds of degeneracy and decay, and it is of the highest credit to both, that there is now within the law more freedom for more people, and that

what peculiarly distinguishes the legislation of today is its greater concern for the needs of the unfortunate and its hearkening more to the desires of the humble. To turn back is to gain nothing for liberty and to lose much for humanity.

The complaint of overlegislation is an ancient one, first voiced in the cry, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and it has been repeated in every generation since by those who saw their advantage in "the simple plan

That they shall take, who have the power

And they shall keep who can."

But if justice and humanity, rather than force and cunning, are to order the rights of men, there must be laws. These will not express the whole duty of man to his fellow man, and much must be left to the sense of individual obligation, but the spirit of brotherhood is a broadening one in its influence and expands the sphere of public concern, as much as that of personal sympathy.

We find in our legislation some enactments that are crude, superfluous and misdirected, and some that may wear the mask of false pretense, but in the main it is well intended and measurably efficient of its purpose. The striving manifested is for a purer public life, a more perfect administration of justice, a kindlier dealing with the unfortunate and the erring, a more general education of the people, the protection of every man in the earnings of his labor, the betterment of material conditions, the conservation of health, the promotion of morals and more equal opportunities for all in the struggle of life. In an effort of this kind we may expect some mistakes and can well afford to bear with them.

A want of confidence in our representative institutions is responsible for many of the faults in their working. Most of the states originally had legislative sessions every year, but to check legislative activity they changed to the biennial plan until now only six have annual sessions. Of the thirty-nine states in which the General Assembly meets biennially, twenty-eight restrict the session to from forty to ninety days by express constitutional limitations or by provisions as to compensation of members having that effect. The mere business of the state has increased to

such extent as to require for its proper transaction most of the time allotted. The result is to prevent the due consideration of measures, but not their enactment. Each member is insistent upon his own favorite bill and to secure its passage, consents sometimes inconsiderately to the passage of others. So laws are made in haste, to be repealed at leisure. Pascal excuses the length of one of his Provincial Letters on the ground that he had not time to make it shorter. A glance at the something more than "five feet" of legislative volumes accumulated during the year indicates a like fault with a like excuse. Some of the largest books are the products of the shortest sessions and conspicuous among the states regarded as most conservative are some which have unlimited annual sessions.

Until recently no provision was made by law in any state for assisting legislators in their work. The member came impressed with the existence of some evil for which he would provide a remedy without the knowledge often of what had been done respecting it elsewhere, or perhaps even of what was the existing law of his own state. The necessity for some educational work by the state in behalf of its own lawmaking was first perceived by New York, which in 1890 provided for publishing bulletins of the laws of other states, and this was followed in 1901 by Wisconsin in the establishment of a Legislative Reference Department upon a more elaborate plan. Montana, North Dakota and Pennsylvania this year followed the example of Wisconsin and now the system is in use in more than a dozen of the states. North Dakota attempted to go a step farther by the appointment of a bureau whose duty it would be to "couch in clear, concise and terse English and in legal form" all bills and resolutions submitted to it by any member of the General Assembly, it being further provided that no bill or resolution not drawn by this bureau, or approved by it as to form, should be printed until after it had been reported on favorably. The bill providing for this was vetoed by the governor.

While the public has been late and slow in coming to the assistance of its representatives they have not been left entirely without aid. Side by side with the House and Senate there grew up a