Perhaps we begin to detect the prejudice in the general mind, which is notable in the works of a few earlier theorists, to prefer statute law to what is known as judge-made law, on that ground alone. The writer is not of the school that admits there is such a thing as judge-made law, but believes the phrase to be a misnomer, at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The whole theory of the English law is that it exists in and by the people and is known of them before it is announced by a judge, and although the extreme of this theory be somewhat metaphysical, it is certainly true that a judge is a very bad judge who does not decide a point of law apparently new or doubtful according to the entire body of English-American precedent, experience, rather than by his own way of looking at things. If judges really made new law, particularly if they made it consciously, it would be more than "aristocratic"--it would be simply tyrannical, and, of course, be unconstitutional as well as being an interference with the legislative branch of government. But it is doubtless this theory, that it is the statute law that is the democratic kind, which has given form and body to the vast mass of statutes we are here to consider. Certain of our legislators seem to be horrified when a court applies a precedent a hundred years old, still more when it is a thousand years old, although to the jurist, in most cases at least, if never since questioned and never grown obsolete, it is entitled to all the more respect for that reason. Both the labor interests and the "special interests" resent excessively the recent tendency of intelligent judges to look at precedent and history. Mr. Debs will tell you that such matters are aristocratic and reactionary; Mr. Rockefeller, or his lawyer, that they are both visionary and obsolete. Yet a statute may only represent the sudden will of a small body of mediocre intelligence on a new subject (or an old one) which they have never studied. It is true that if they make a mistake they can amend it to-morrow; but so, also, may be amended the decisions of the court. VII AMERICAN LEGISLATION ON PROPERTY RIGHTS