This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ... V. MASONIC LAW MAKING 1O idea is today more familiar than the idea of making law. Wherever any sort of sovereign authority exists, men take for granted that it will proceed to justify its existence by copious legislation and assume as a matter of course that the quantity of its legislative output is the measure of its efficiency. This was not always true. Indeed conscious law-making on any large scale is a wholly modern phenomenon not only in the state but in those human organizations which exist to conserve other than political values and secure other than political interests, but are organized along lines analogous to those which govern politically organized society. Hence by way of introduction it is worth while to give some account of the development of legislation in the legal systems of modern states. Five stages may be perceived in the development of legislation as the everyday agency of law-making: (1) unconscious legislation in the period of customary law, (2) declaratory legislation in the period when the traditional law is reduced to writing, (3) selection and amendment when by the political union of peoples with divergent customs it becomes necessary to choose in declaring the custom of the new whole, (4) conscious constructive law-making as an occasional expedient, at first to meet political exigencies, but gradually to effect important changes here and there in the legal system in great emergencies, and (5) habitual legislation as the ordinary agency of development, usually culminating in codification of the law as a whole. In the first stage of legal development, the stage of traditional modes of decision based upon repeated decisions by supposed divine inspiration, there is not a little unconscious law-making. The case in...