Popular Law-making | Page 6

marriage between blacks and whites is not made unlawful, but where practically it is made tremendously unlawful by the force of public opinion. Take the case of debts of honor, so-called, debts of gambling; they are paid far more universally than ordinary commercial debts, even by the same people; but there is no law enforcing them--there is no sanction for the collection of gambling debts. And take any custom that grows up. We know how strong our customs in college are. Take the mere custom of a club table; no one dares or ventures to supplant the members at that table. That kind of sanction is just as good a law as a law made by statute and imposing five or ten dollars penalty or a week's imprisonment. And judges or juries recognize those things as laws, just as much as they do statute laws; when all other laws are lacking, our courts will ask what is the "custom of the trade." These be laws; and are often better enforced than the statute law; the rules of the New York Stock Exchange are better enforced than the laws of the State legislature. Now all our early Anglo-Saxon law was law of that kind. And it was not written down for a great many centuries, and even after being first written it wasn't usual to affix any penalty; they were mere customs, but of an iron-bound nature--customs that were followed far more devoutly than the masses of our people follow any of our written laws to-day. And their "sanction" was twofold: In the first place, the sanction I have mentioned, universal custom, social ostracism for breach. A second and very obvious sanction, that if you do a thing that I don't like and think is against the law, I am going to knock you down or kill you if I can! That was a sanction, and a perfectly good one; and the question that arose, therefore, was not at all as to penalty for the law-breaker; it was whether there should be a penalty for the law-breaker's being killed. That is the reason they didn't have to have any penalty! In those days if there was a custom that a certain tribe had a certain pasture, and a man of another tribe pastured his cattle in that pasture, the first man would go to him and they would have a fight, and if he killed him he would be, as we say, arrested; then the matter would be inquired into by the kin of the murdered man or neighbors, and if the killer could prove that the murdered man had committed a breach of the law, he went off scot free--so, as a matter of fact he would to-day, if it were justifiable homicide. In other words, it was a question of whether it was justifiable homicide; and that brought in the question what the law was, and it was usually only in that way. For the law was but universal custom, and that custom had no sanction; but for breach of the custom anybody could make personal attack, or combine with his friends to make attack, on the person that committed the breach, and then, when the matter was taken up by the members of both tribes, and finally by the Witenagemot as a judicial court, the question was, what the law was; and if it was proved, for instance, that the law was that there was private property in that pasture belonging to the man who committed the murder he went off scot free. That was the working of the old Anglo-Saxon law, and it was a great many centuries before the notion of law changed in their minds from that. And this "unwritten law" perdures in the minds of many of the people to-day.
So it was that the Witenagemot--this Great Council of the realm--was primarily judicial, in the first instance always judicial; that is, it never made new laws. It got together to try people for the breach of law; and that incidentally brought up the validity of the old law, and then decided whether old law was valid or not. In a sense, therefore, you see they told what the law was, they announced it; but they never supposed they were making new laws. That was the last thing they intended to do, and the last thing the people would have stood, had they tried it.
So much for the growth of law, the origin of Anglo-Saxon law, as we understand it, and for representative government, and for the origin of Parliament. I doubt if there was any giving of new law, anything that we should call legislation, made by the English Parliament, then called the Witenagemot, before the Norman Conquest. I have never been able to find