Popular Law-making

My object in the lectures upon which this work is based was to give some notion of the problems of the time (in this country, of course, particularly) which are confronting legislators primarily, political parties in the second place, but finally all good citizens. The treatment was as untechnical as possible. The lectures themselves were for men who meant to go into business, for journalists, or political students; a general view—an elemental, broad general view—of the problems that confront legislation to-day. So is the book not one for lawyers alone; it seeks to cover both what has been accomplished by law-making in the past, and what is now being adopted or even proposed; the history of statutes of legislation by the people as distinct from "judge-made" law; how far legislatures can cure the evils that confront the state or the individual, and what the future of American legislation is likely to be. Constitutional difficulties I had merely mentioned, as there was another course of lectures on American constitutional principles, which supplemented it. In those I tried to show what we cannot do by legislation; in these I merely discussed what had been done, and tried to show what we are now doing. What we may not do may sound, perhaps, like a narrow field; but the growth of constitutional law in this country is so wide—in the first place including all the English Constitution, and more than that, so many principles of human liberty that have been adopted into our Constitution, either at the time it was adopted, or which have crept into it through the Fourteenth Amendment, with all the innovations of State constitutions as well—that really the discussion of what cannot be done by statute takes one almost over the entire range of constitutional law and even into the discussion of what cannot be done in a free country or under ordinary principles of human liberty.