Great uncertainty as to the meaning of statutes often results because the most ordinary canons of English composition have been ignored. Intent on expressing the legislative thought in that language which we call legal, the draftsman often makes the law unintelligible to laymen.

It is important of course that the statute law be so expressed that the courts and those learned in the law may know its meaning. Yet that trial courts and lawyers do not always know the meaning of statutes is evidenced by the fact that the appellate courts are so constantly called upon to construe them. In the last volume of the Wisconsin supreme court reports, representing three months output and containing about one hundred cases, the court found it necessary to construe for the lower court or otherwise refer to, one hundred and twenty-six different sections of the revised statutes and twenty-nine chapters of the session laws. If lawyers and judges are puzzled over the meaning of these statutes it is no wonder that laymen are often at fault.