carpenter has tools which are too good? What is really meant is that too many bills are drafted. There are too many bills drafted but there are no more in proportion, considering the great agitation going on in this state than in other states. Indeed they are far less than in the old days when annual sessions were held for the purpose of giving away franchises and passing hundreds of private and local laws. Regulative bills and those of a general nature have increased recently in congress and in every state legislature in this country as well as in foreign countries. It means that democracy now is alert and is trying to demolish the old statutes and install new ones.
It is a good condition for the country—a nation is safer than when too much complacency exists. The deadened or uncivilized nations are the only ones which do not require change in laws.
As Walter Bagehot says: "There is a diffused desire in civilized communities for an adjusting legislation; for a legislation which should adapt the inherited laws to the new wants of a world which now changes every day. It has ceased to be necessary to maintain bad laws, because it is necessary to have some laws. Civilization is robust enough to bear the incision of legal improvements." England is a good example of the new activity in legislation.
Any flood of legislation may easily be stopped by the
