with better critical methods, the inner meaning of the laws and institutions of different countries, and to trace the general lines on which they have developed in the past, and may be expected to develop in the future.
One might amuse oneself by speculating on the differences which Montesquieu would have observed, and on the general reflections which he might have made, if he had been called upon to pass in review the governments and legislation of the present day. He would have found in almost every part of the civilized world governments with representative legislatures and parliamentary institutions, all more or less on the English lines which he had admired and described, and all recognizing, though in greater or less degree, and in different forms, his principle of the separation between the three functions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. And he would have found all these legislatures actively and continuously engaged in the work of legislation, and producing new laws with prodigious fertility and in bewildering variety.
Besides the legislatures of European and South American States, there are within the British Empire between sixty and seventy different legislatures, and in the United States forty-eight local legislatures, in addition to the central legislature consisting of Senate and Congress. And in the year 1901 these forty-eight United States legislatures enacted no less than 14,190 new laws. When Montesquieu wrote, the British Parliament was practically the only representative legislature in the world, and the only legislature which was continuously at work. And its output of legislation was comparatively modest. Let us take the record of the session of 1730, when Montesquieu was attending debates at St.
