One needs only to make a cursory survey of the periodical literature, treatises on government and politics, and the reports of proceedings of numerous societies of lawyers and jurists to be thoroughly impressed that there is a widespread conviction, based no doubt upon abundant evidence, that the average popular legislative assembly, if not corrupt and venal, is inherently weak and incompetent, and to this incompetency, plus some corrupt and sinister purposes, may be charged most of the ills we suffer from an incongruous and incomprehensible mass of statute law. The legislative department, the source of all our statute law, has from the beginning been under suspicion and criticism. Our constitutional limitations have been aimed for the most part at the legislative branch, and the bulk of criticism points the same way. We have been, and still are, afflicted with overlegislation and with bad legislation. The annual output of the American legislatures, we are told, is 15,000 laws covering 25,000 pages; from 1899 to 1904 the total number of acts passed by American legislatures was 45,552 while during substantially the same period, the English parliament, legislating for 42,000,000 of home population and millions of dependents, enacted less than 1500 laws, special and general. That the laws are of doubtful quality is indicated by the fact that in New York alone during a period of about twenty years over 500 statutes were challenged in the courts for unconstitutionality, and the amount of litigation due to uncertainty in the statute law passes computation.