In my first chapter I dealt mainly with those political institutions of the earliest times—institutions common to our whole race, institutions which still live on untouched among some small primitive communities of our race—out of which the still living Constitution of England grew. It is now my business, as the second part of my subject, to trace the steps by which that Constitution grew out of a political state with which at first sight it seems to have so little in common. My chief point is that it did thus, in the strictest sense, grow out of that state. Our English Constitution was never made, in the sense in which the Constitutions of many other countries have been made. There never was any moment when Englishmen drew out their political system in the shape of a formal document, whether as the carrying out of any abstract political theories or as the imitation of the past or present system of any other nation. There are indeed certain great political documents, each of which forms a landmark in our political history. There is the Great Charter, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights. But not one of these gave itself out as the enactment of anything new. All claimed to set forth, with new strength, it might be, and with new clearness, those rights of Englishmen which were already old. In all our great political struggles the voice of Englishmen has never called for the assertion of new principles, for the enactment of new laws; the cry has always been for the better observance of the laws which were already in force, for the redress of grievances which had arisen from their corruption or neglect(1). Till the Great Charter was wrung from John, men called for the laws of good King Eadward. And when the tyrant had unwillingly set his seal to the groundwork of all our later Law, men called for the stricter observance of a Charter which was deemed to be itself only the laws of Eadward in a newer dress(2). We have made changes from time to time; but they have been changes which have been at once conservative and progressive—conservative because progressive, progressive because conservative. They have been the application of ancient principles to new circumstances; they have been the careful repairs of an old building, not the pulling down of an old building and the rearing up of a new. The life and soul of English law has ever been precedent; we have always held that whatever our fathers once did their sons have a right to do again. When the Estates of the Realm declared the throne of James the Second to be vacant, they did not seek to justify the act by any theories of the right of resistance, or by any doctrines of the rights of man. It was enough that, three hundred years before, the Estates of the Realm had declared the throne of Richard the Second to be vacant(3). By thus walking in the old paths, by thus hearkening to the wisdom of our forefathers, we have been able to change whenever change has been needed, and we have been kept back from changing out of the mere love of abstract theory. We have thus been able to advance, if somewhat slowly, yet the more surely; and when we have made a false step, we have been able to retrace it. On this last power, the power of undoing whatever has been done amiss, I wish specially to insist. In tracing the steps by which our Constitution has grown into its present shape, I shall try specially to show in how many cases the best acts of modern legislation have been, wittingly or unwittingly, a falling back on the principles of our earliest times. In my first chapter I tried to show how our fathers brought with them into the Isle of Britain those primÆval institutions which were common to them with the whole Teutonic race. I tried to show how those institutions were modified in the course of time by the circumstances of the English Conquest of Britain, and by the events which followed that Conquest. I showed how the kingly power grew with every increase of the territorial extent of the kingdom; how the old nobility of birth gave way to a new nobility of personal relation to the sovereign; and how the effect of these changes seems to have been to make it easier for the individual freeman of the lower rank to rise, but at the same time to lower the position of the ordinary freemen as a class. This last change was still more largely brought about as an independent result of the same changes which tended to increase the kingly power. In a state of things where representation is unknown, where every freeman is an elector and a lawgiver, but where, if he exercises his elective and legislative rights, he must exercise them directly in his own person—in such a state of things as this every increase of the national territory makes those rights of less practical value, and causes the actual powers of government to be shut up in the hands of a smaller body. There is no doubt that in the earliest Teutonic assemblies every freeman had his place. There is no doubt that in England every freeman kept his place in the smaller local assemblies of the mark, the hundred, and the shire(4). He still, where modern legislation has not wholly swept it away, keeps, as I hinted in my former lecture, some faint shadow of the old right when he gives a vote in the assembly, in which the assembly of the mark still lives on, that is, in the vestry of his parish. But how as to the great assembly of all, the Assembly of the Wise, the WitenagemÓt of the whole realm? No ancient record gives us any clear or formal account of the constitution of that body. It is commonly spoken of in a vague way as a gathering of the wise, the noble, the great men(5). But, alongside of passages like these, we find other passages which speak of it in a way which implies a far more popular constitution. King Eadward is said to be chosen King by “all folk.” Earl Godwine “makes his speech before the King and all the people of the land.” Judicial sentences and other acts of authority are voted by the army, that is by the people under arms. Sometimes we find direct mention of the presence of large and popular classes of men, as the citizens of London or Winchester(6). The inference from all this is obvious. The right of the ordinary freeman to attend, to vote—it might perhaps be nearer the truth to say to shout(7)—in the general Assembly of the whole realm was never formally taken away. But it was a right which, in its own nature, most men could hardly ever exercise. None but men of wealth would have the means, none but men of some personal importance would have any temptation, to take long journeys for such a purpose. It is not likely that any great multitude would, under ordinary circumstances, set off from Northern England to attend meetings which were habitually held at Westminster, Winchester, and Gloucester. It is plain that the habitual attendance would not go beyond a small body of chief men, Earls, Bishops, Abbots, the officers of the King’s court, the Thegns of the greatest wealth or the highest personal influence. But it is plain that, when the heart of the nation was specially stirred by some overwhelming interest, many men would find their way to the Assembly who would not find their way to it in ordinary times. And, when the Assembly was held in a town, the citizens of that town at once formed a popular element ready on the spot. Hence we can account for the seemingly contradictory way in which the Assembly is spoken of, sometimes in language which would imply an aristocratic body, sometimes in language which would imply a body highly democratic. It was in fact a body, democratic in ancient theory, aristocratic in ordinary practice, but to which any strong popular impulse could at any time restore its ancient democratic character(8). Acts done by a freely chosen representative body may, without much straining of language, be said to be done by the whole people. But acts done by a body not representative could never be called the acts of the whole people, unless the whole people had an acknowledged right to attend its meetings, though that right might, under all ordinary circumstances, be exercised only by a few of their number.

Out of this body, whose constitution, by the time of the Norman Conquest, had become not a little anomalous and not a little fluctuating, our Parliament directly grew. Of one House of that Parliament we may say more; we may say, not that it grew out of the ancient Assembly but that it is absolutely the same by personal identity. The House of Lords not only springs out of, it actually is, the ancient WitenagemÓt. I can see no break between the two. King William summoned his Witan as King Eadward had summoned them before him. In one memorable assembly of the Conqueror’s reign, we read that the great men of the realm were reinforced by the presence of the whole body of the landholders of England, whose number tradition handed down as sixty thousand(9). But, as a rule, the Great Councils after the Norman Conquest bear the same uncertain and fluctuating character as the GemÓts of earlier days. In the constitution of the House of Lords I can see nothing mysterious or wonderful. Its hereditary character came in, like other things, step by step, by accident rather than by design. And it should not be forgotten that, as long as the Bishops keep their seats in the House, the hereditary character of the House does not extend to all its members. To me it seems simply that two classes of men, the two highest classes, the Earls and the Bishops, never lost or disused that right of attending in the National Assembly which was at first common to them with all other freemen. Besides these two classes, the King summoned other men to our early Parliaments, pretty much, it would seem, at his own pleasure. The right of the King so to do could not be denied; when all had an abstract right to attend, we cannot blame the King for specially summoning those for whose attendance he specially wished. But it would almost naturally follow that such a special summons would gradually be held to bestow an exclusive right, and that those who were not specially summoned would soon be looked upon as having no part or lot in the matter. But it is certain that it was long before such a summons was held to confer a hereditary, or even a lasting personal right. The King did not always summon the same men to every Parliament. Besides the Earls and the Bishops, others both of the laity and the clergy were always summoned, but the list of those who were summoned, both of the laity and of the lesser ecclesiastical dignitaries, constantly varies from Parliament to Parliament(10). That the personal summons conveyed an exclusive hereditary right was one of those devices of lawyers of which so many have crept into our constitution. When the notion of hereditary right had once established itself, the formal creation of peerages by patent was a natural stage. Looking at the matter from this historical point of view, it seems to me simply wonderful how any one can doubt the power of the Crown to create life-peerages, or to regulate the tenure or succession of a peerage in any way that it thinks good.

The House of Lords then, I do not hesitate to say, represents, or rather is, the ancient WitenagemÓt. An assembly in which at first every freeman had a right to appear has, by the force of circumstances, step by step, without any one moment of sudden change, shrunk up into an Assembly wholly hereditary and official, an Assembly to which the Crown may summon any man, but to which, it is now strangely held, the Crown cannot refuse to summon the representatives of any man whom it has once summoned. As in most other things, the tendency to shrink up into a body of this kind began to show itself before the Norman Conquest, and was finally confirmed and established through the results of the Norman Conquest. But the special function of the body into which the old national Assembly has changed, the function of “another House,” an Upper House, a House of Lords as opposed to a House of Commons, could not show itself till a second House of a more popular constitution had arisen by its side. Like everything else in our English polity, both Houses in some sort came of themselves. Neither of them was the creation of any ingenious theorist, though we need not doubt that many of the several steps in the growth of each were, each in its own time, the work of practical statesmanship. Our forefathers had no theories; but men, each in his own generation, had eyes keen enough to see that such and such a change in detail would get rid of such and such an immediate evil, or would bring with it such and such an immediate advantage. Nay more, it has sometimes happened that a change which was brought in with an evil intent has in the end worked for good. Measures which were taken with a view of strengthening the power of the Crown have come in the end to widen the rights of the people. On the other hand, institutions which once answered a good and needful purpose have sometimes, through change of times, changed their nature and have become instruments of evil instead of good. But in neither case were the institutions of our fathers the work of abstract theory. They have therefore lived on, and they have borne good fruit. Our national Assembly has changed its name and its constitution, but its corporate identity has lived on unbroken. We can therefore at any moment reform without destroying. In France, on the other hand, institutions have been the work of abstract theory; they have been the creations, for good or for evil, of the minds of individual men. The English Parliament is immemorial; it grew step by step out of the older order of things. In France the older order of things utterly vanished; the ground lay open for the creation of a wholly new institution, and the States-General were called into being at the bidding of Philip the Fair(11). Englishmen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had no theories of the rights of man or of universal humanity. But when they saw a practical grievance, they called for its redress. Frenchmen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had theories as magnificent as any that have been put forth in the eighteenth or the nineteenth. And they had even then already learned to do deeds of blood in the name of freedom and philanthropy(12). Therefore French institutions have not lasted. The States-General lived but a fitful life from century to century, and they perished for ever in the Great Revolution. Since that time no French institution, no form either of the legislative or of the executive power, has been able to keep up a continuous being of twenty years. This difference has not been owing to any lack of great men or of noble purposes on the part of our continental neighbours. It has been owing, partly, we may believe, to differences in the inborn character of the two nations, partly to differences in the course taken by their several histories. In France the Kings gradually swept away all traces of older free institutions, and established a simple despotism in the Crown(13). The French therefore have been left without any traditional foundation to build on. In all their changes for good or for evil they have been driven to build afresh from the beginning. Our Kings never wholly wiped out our free institutions; they found means to turn them to their own purposes, and to establish a practical despotism without destroying the outward forms of freedom. The forms thus lived on, and in better times they could again be clothed with their substance. We ever had traditional principles to fall back upon, a traditional basis to build upon. It would be hard to reckon up the number of Assemblies, Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, and Legislative Bodies, which have risen and fallen in France, while the House of Lords and the House of Commons have lived on, with their powers, their duties, their relations to the Crown, to the Nation, and to one another, ever silently changing, but with their continuous being remaining throughout unbroken.

But I would again point out that, while the growth of English institutions has thus gone on almost in obedience to a natural law, the wisdom, the foresight, the patriotism, of individual statesmen is never to be put out of our reckoning. There was a given state of things, and some man had keenness of sight to see what was the right thing to do in that state of things. Our Constitution has no founder; but there is one man to whom we may give all but honours of a founder, one man to whose wisdom and self-devotion we owe that English history has taken the course which it has taken for the last six hundred years. It might no doubt have taken that course without him; things might have come about as they did without any one man coming so prominently to the front; or, if he had not arisen, some other man might have arisen to do his work. But we need not speculate as to what might have been; it is enough that one man did arise to do the work, that there is one man to whom we owe that the wonderful thirteenth century, the great creative and destructive age throughout the world(14), was to us an age of creation and not of destruction. That man, the man who finally gave to English freedom its second and more lasting shape, the hero and martyr of England in the greatest of her constitutional struggles, was Simon of Montfort, Earl of Leicester. If we may not call him the founder of the English Constitution, we may at least call him the founder of the House of Commons(15). It was in his age that the new birth of English freedom began to show itself; it was mainly by his work that that new birth was not stifled before it had brought forth lasting fruits. Strange it may at first sight seem that the founder of the later liberties of England was not an Englishman. Simon of Montfort, a native of France, did for the land of his adoption what even he might not have been able to do for the land of his birth. And why? The land of his birth was—shall I say flourishing or suffering?—under the baleful virtues of the most righteous of Kings. Saint Lewis reigned in France, Saint Lewis the just and holy, the man who never swerved from the path of right, the man who swared to his neighbour and disappointed him not, though it were to his own hindrance. Under his righteous rule there could be no ground for revolt or disaffection. By surrounding the Crown with the reflected glory of his own virtues, he did more than any other man to strengthen its power. He thus did more than any other man to pave the way for that foul despotism of his successors whose evil deeds would have daily vexed his righteous soul. In England, on the other hand, we had the momentary curse, the lasting blessing, of a succession of evil Kings. We had Kings who had no spark of English feeling in their breasts, but from whose follies and necessities our fathers were able to wring their freedom, all the more lastingly because it was bit by bit that it was wrung. A Latin poet once sang that freedom never flourishes more brightly than it does under a righteous King(16). And so it does while that righteous King himself tarries among men. But to win freedom as an heritage for ever there are times when we have more need of the vices of Kings than of their virtues. The tyranny of our Angevin masters woke up English freedom from its momentary grave. Had Richard and John and Henry been Kings like Ælfred and Saint Lewis, the crosier of Stephen Langton, the sword of Robert Fitzwalter, would never have flashed at the head of the Barons and people of England; the heights of Lewes would never have seen the mightiest triumph of her freedom; the pavement of Evesham choir would never have closed over the mangled relics of her noblest champion(17).

The career of Simon of Montfort is the most glorious in our later history. Cold must be the heart of every Englishman who does not feel a thrill of reverence and gratitude as he utters that immortal name. But, fully to understand his work, we must go back somewhat before his own time, we must go back and trace how the sway of foreign invaders first made the path ready for the course of the foreign deliverer. I have shown in what state our Constitution stood at the time of the Norman Conquest. In that Constitution, be it ever remembered, the Norman Conquest made no formal change whatever. Nothing has had a more lasting effect on all later English history than the personal character and position of the Norman Conqueror. But it was not in the character of a legislator that the main work of William was done. His greatest work of all was to weld together the still imperfectly united kingdoms of our ancient England into one indivisible body, a body which, since his day, no man has ever dreamed of rending asunder. But this was not the work of any formal legislative enactment; it was the silent result of the compression of foreign conquest. So it was with William’s whole policy and position. He was in truth a Conqueror, King by the edge of the sword, but it was his aim in everything to disguise the fact. He claimed the Crown by legal right; he received it by the formal election of the English people, and he was consecrated to his kingly office by the hands of an English Primate. He professed to rule, not according to his own will, not according to any laws of his own devising, but according to the laws of his predecessor and kinsman King Eadward(18). The great immediate change which was wrought under him was not any formal legislative change; it was the silent revolution implied in the transfer—the wary and gradual transfer—of all the greatest estates and highest offices in England to the hands of foreign holders. The momentary effect was to make Englishmen on their own soil the subjects of foreign conquerors. The lasting effect was to change those foreign conquerors into Englishmen, and to call forth the spirit of English freedom in a more definite and antagonistic shape than it had ever before put on. What was the real position of a landowner of Norman descent within a generation or two after the Conquest? He held English lands according to English law; in all but the highest rank he lived on equal terms with other landowners of English birth; he was himself born on English soil, often of an English mother; he was called on in endless ways to learn, to obey, and to administer, the laws of England. Such a man soon became in feeling, and before long in speech also, as good an Englishman as if he had come of the male line of Hengest or Cerdic. There was nothing to hinder even one of the actual conquerors from thoroughly throwing in his lot with his new country and with its people. His tongue was French, but in truth he had far more in common with the Englishman than with the Frenchman. He was but a near kinsman slightly disguised. The Norman was a Dane who, in his sojourn in Gaul, had put on a slight French varnish, and who came into England to be washed clean again. The blood of the true Normans, in the real Norman districts of Bayeux and Coutances, differs hardly at all from the blood of the inhabitants of the North and East of England(19). See a French soldier and a Norman farmer side by side, and you feel at once that the Norman is nothing but a long-parted kinsman. The general effect of him is that of a man of Yorkshire or Lincolnshire who has somehow picked up a bad habit of talking French. Such men readily became Englishmen. We have the distinct assertions of contemporary writers, and every incidental notice bears out their assertions, that, among all classes between the highest and the lowest, among all between the great noble and the villain, the distinction of Norman and Englishman had been forgotten within little more than a hundred years after the time when King William came into England(20). And presently other causes came to make all the sons of the soil draw nearer and nearer together. A new dynasty filled the throne, a dynasty which claimed by female descent to be at once Norman and English, but which, in origin and feeling, was neither Norman nor English(21). Henry the Second, Count of Anjou through his father, Duke of Aquitaine through his wife, inherited also his mother’s claims on Normandy and England, but under him Normandy and England alike were but parts of a vast dominion which stretched from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. Under the mighty, and on the whole the righteous, sway of the great Henry the worst side of this state of things did not show itself(22). Under his sons and his grandson England felt to the full the bitterness and the blessings of the Conquest. The land was overrun by utter strangers; the men of Old-English birth and the descendants of the first Norman settlers both saw the natives of other lands placed over the heads of both alike. Places of trust and honour and wealth were handed over to foreign favourites, and every man in the land was exposed to a yet heavier scourge, to the violence and insolence of foreign mercenaries. Under John Normandy was lost(23), and England again became the chief possession of the King of England. But neither John nor Henry learned the lesson. The personal vices of the father, the personal virtues of the son, worked to the same end as far as their kingdom was concerned. The King whose wickedness became a proverb, who surrounded himself with the kindred ruffians of every nation, and the King whose chief fault was that he could never say No to his wife or his mother, helped alike to call forth the spirit of resistance, to draw all Englishmen of whatever origin nearer together, and thereby to work out the great work of giving England a free and lasting Constitution. For such Kings we may well be thankful, but to such Kings we owe no thanks. Our feelings of personal thankfulness towards any of our later Kings begin only when a King arose who joined the political skill of Henry the Second to the personal virtues of Henry the Third, and who added to both a feeling of English patriotism, a ruling sense of right in public affairs, of which neither Henry ever felt the slightest spark in his bosom. Edward the First, the first of our later Kings who bore an English name and an English heart, was the first round whose name can gather any feelings of personal thankfulness. In him we see the first of our Kings of foreign blood who did aught for the growth of our constitutional rights in some other way than that of calling forth the spirit of resistance to his rule.

Thus it was that the misgovernment of our Angevin Kings called forth among all the natives of the land an universal spirit of revolt against the domination of strangers within the realm. And they called forth the spirit of revolt in another way, a way hardly less important, by their base subserviency to a foreign power in ecclesiastical matters. I have here nothing to do with theological dogmas, with their truth or their falsehood, but the ecclesiastical position of the nation forms a most important aspect of its history throughout these times. In Old-English times there can be no doubt as to the existence of an effective supremacy in ecclesiastical matters on the part of the Crown. The King was the Supreme Governor of the Church, because he was the Supreme Governor of the Nation. The Church and the Nation were absolutely the same; the King and his Witan dealt with ecclesiastical questions and disposed of ecclesiastical offices by the same right by which they dealt with temporal questions and disposed of temporal offices(24). The Bishop and the Ealdorman, each appointed by the same authority, presided jointly in the assembly of the shire, and the assembly over which they presided dealt freely both with ecclesiastical and with temporal causes. One of the few formal changes in our Law which took place in the days of the Conqueror was the separation of the two jurisdictions of the Bishop and the Ealdorman. One of William’s extant laws ordained the establishment, according to continental models, of distinct ecclesiastical courts for the trial of ecclesiastical cause(25). But more important than this formal change was the practical result of the Conquest in bringing England into closer connexion than before with the See of Rome. The enterprise of the Conqueror was approved by Hildebrand, and it was blessed by the Pope in whose name Hildebrand already ruled(26). While William lived, the royal supremacy remained untouched, and, allowing for his position in a conquered land, we may fairly say that it was not abused. But in meaner hands the ancient power of the Crown as the representative of the nation was often abused and often disputed. Quarrels arose as to the limits of the ecclesiastical and the civil power such as had never been heard of in the old times. And we must remember that claims which seem utterly monstrous now were far from seeming monstrous in a state of things so wholly unlike our times. Even the claim of the clergy to an exemption from temporal jurisdiction in criminal cases had a very different look then from what it has now. The privilege thus claimed was by no means confined to the priesthood; it took in a large part of those among the people who were least able to defend themselves(27). And when we think of the horrible punishments, death, and mutilations worse than death, which the courts of our Angevin Kings freely inflicted for very slight offences, we can understand that men looked favourably on the courts of the Bishops, where the heaviest penalties were stripes and imprisonment. In the disputes between the Crown and the Church, from William Rufus to Henry the Second, we find popular feeling always enlisted on the ecclesiastical side(28). Nor need we wonder at this, when we find among the Constitutions of Clarendon, which King Henry strove to enforce and which Archbishop Thomas withstood, one which forbad the ordination of villains without the consent of their lords. That is to say, it cut off from the lowest class the only path by which they had any hope of rising to posts of honour and authority(29). But from the reign of John onwards we get a new state of things. A foreign power stepped in, a power which had as yet meddled but little in the strictly internal affairs of England, and which, so far as it had meddled at all, had on the whole taken the popular side. In the latter days of John and through the whole reign of Henry the Third, we find the Pope and the King in strict alliance against the English Church and Nation. The last good deed done by a Pope towards England was when Innocent the Third sent us Stephen Langton(30). Ever afterwards we find Pope and King leagued together to back up each other’s oppressions and exactions. The Papal power was always ready to step in on behalf of the Crown, always ready to hurl spiritual censures against the champions of English freedom. The Great Charter was denounced at Rome; so was its author the patriot Primate(31). Earl Simon died excommunicate; but, in the belief of Englishmen, the excommunications of Rome could not hinder an English Earl from working countless signs and wonders(32)—a pretty convincing argument, one might deem, that the Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction in this realm of England. Against King and Pope the whole nation stood united; clergy and laity, nobles and commons, men of Norman and men of Old-English birth, all stood together alike against the King’s foreign favourites and against the aggressions of Rome. The historians of the age, all of them churchmen, most of them monks, are all but unanimous on the popular side. Prelates like the Primate Stephen, like Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln and Walter of Cantelupe of Worcester, were foremost in the good cause; the two latter were among the closest friends and counsellors of the patriot Earl(33). We see how old distinctions and old enmities had been wiped out, how all the sons of the soil were banded together in one fellowship, when we read the letter denouncing the abuses of the Roman See which was sent to that See in the name of no less a body than the whole Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of the English realm. In that letter, an out-spoken and truly English document, which has been preserved by an historian who well appreciated it, the writers set forth that, as the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons in whose name it is written have no common seal, they have, for the signature of their document, borrowed the seal of the city of London(34).

This last fact brings me round to what I first spoke of long ago, what I may perhaps seem to have forgotten, but what I have in truth had constantly before my eyes, the distinctly constitutional reforms which we owe to Earl Simon of Montfort. The fact that a document which professed to speak in the name of all classes of the whole nation could not be so fittingly signed as with the seal of the city of London marks the place which that city held in the political estimation of the time. But London held that position only as the greatest member of an advancing class, as the foremost among the cities and boroughs of England. Now the great work of Earl Simon was to give those cities and boroughs their distinct place as one of the elements of the body politic. Let us trace the steps by which that great work was done. When we reach the thirteenth century, we may look on the old Teutonic constitution as having utterly passed away. Some faint traces of it indeed we may find here and there in the course of the twelfth century, as when both sides in the wars of Stephen and Matilda acknowledged the right of the citizens of London to a voice in the disposal of the Crown(35). But the regular Great Council, the lineal representatives of the ancient Mycel GemÔt or WitenagemÔt, was shrinking up into a body not very unlike our House of Lords. Its constitution, as I have already hinted, was far more fluctuating, far less strictly hereditary, than the modern body, but it was almost as far from being in any sense a representation of the people. The Great Charter secures the rights of the nation and of the national Assembly as against arbitrary legislation and arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. But it makes no change in the constitution of the Assembly itself. The greater Barons were to be summoned personally; the lesser tenants in chief, the representatives of the landsittende menn of Domesday, were to be summoned by a general writ(36). The Great Charter in short is a Bill of Rights; it is not what, in modern phrase, we understand by a Reform Bill. But, during the reigns of John and Henry the Third, a popular element was fast making its way into the national Councils in a more practical form. The right of the ordinary freeman to attend in person had long been a shadow; that of the ordinary tenant-in-chief was becoming hardly more practical; it now begins to be exchanged for what had by this time become the more practical right of choosing representatives to act in his name. Like all other things in England, this right has grown up by degrees and as the result of what we might almost call a series of happy accidents. Both in the reign of John and in the former part of the reign of Henry, we find several instances of knights from each county being summoned(37). Here we have the beginning of our county members and of the title which they still bear, of knights of the shire. Here is the beginning of popular representation, as distinct from the gathering of the people in their own persons; but we need not think that those who first summoned them had any conscious theories of popular representation. The earliest object for which they were called together was probably a fiscal one; it was a safe and convenient way of getting money. The notion of summoning a small number of men to act on behalf of the whole was doubtless borrowed from the practice in judicial proceedings and in inquests and commissions of various kinds, in which it was usual for certain select men to swear on behalf of the whole shire or hundred. We must not forget, though it is a matter on which I have no time to insist here, that our judicial and our parliamentary institutions are closely connected, that both sprang out of the primitive Assemblies, that things which now seem so unlike as our popular juries and the judicial powers of the House of Lords are in truth both of them fragments of the judicial powers which Tacitus speaks of as being vested in those primitive Assemblies. It was only step by step that the functions of judge, juror, witness, and legislator became the utterly distinct functions which they are now(38).

Thus we find the beginnings of the House of Commons, as we might have expected, in that class of its members which, for the most part, has most in common with the already established House of Lords. Thus far the developement of the Constitution had gone on in its usual incidental way. Each step in advance, however slight, was doubtless the work of the discernment of some particular man, even though his views may not have gone beyond the compassing of some momentary advantage. But now we come to that great change, that great measure of Parliamentary Reform, which has left to all later reformers nothing to do but to improve in detail. We come to that great act of the patriot Earl which made our popular Chamber really a popular Chamber. A House of knights, of county members, would have been comparatively an aristocratic body; it would have left out one of the most healthy and vigorous, and by far the most progressive, element in the nation. When, after the fight of Lewes, Earl Simon, then master of the kingdom with the King in his safe keeping, summoned his famous Parliament, he summoned, not only two knights from every county, but also two citizens from every city and two burgesses from every borough(39). The Earl had long known the importance and value of the growing civic element in the political society of his age. When, in an earlier stage of his career, he held the government of Gascony, he had, on his return to England, to answer charges brought against him by the Archbishop of Bourdeaux and the nobles of the province. The Earl’s answer was to bring forward a writing, giving him the best of characters, which was signed with the common seal of the city of Bourdeaux(40). As it was in Gascony, so it was in England. The Earl was always a reformer, one who set himself to redress practical grievances, to withstand the royal favourites, to put a check on the oppressions of Pope and King. But his first steps in the way of reform were made wholly on an aristocratic basis. He tried to redress the grievances of the nation by the help of his fellow nobles only. Step by step he learned that no true reform could be wrought for so narrow a platform, and step by step he took into his confidence, first the knights of the counties, and lastly the class to whose good will he had owed so much in his earlier trial, the citizens and burgesses. Through the whole struggle they stood steadily by him; London was as firm in his cause as Bourdeaux had been, and its citizens fought and suffered and triumphed with him on the glorious day of Lewes(41). By a bold and happy innovation, he called a class which had done so much for him and for the common cause to take their place in the councils of the nation. It was in Earl Simon’s Parliament of 1265 that the still abiding elements of the popular chamber, the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses, first appeared side by side. Thus was formed that newly developed Estate of the Realm which was, step by step, to grow into the most powerful of all, the Commons’ House of Parliament.

Such was the gift which England received from her noblest champion and martyr. Nor should it sound strange in our ears that her champion and martyr was by birth a stranger. We boast ourselves that we have led captive our conquerors, and that we have made them into sons of the soil as faithful as ourselves. What we have done with conquerors we have also done with peaceful settlers. In after days we welcomed every victim of oppression and persecution, the Fleming, the Huguenot, and the Palatine. And what we welcomed we adopted and assimilated, and strengthened our English being with all that was worthiest in foreign lands. So can we honour, along with the men of English birth, those men of other lands who have done for England as sons for their own mother. The Danish Cnut ranks alongside of the worthiest of our native Kings. Anselm of Aosta ranks alongside of the worthiest of our native Prelates. And so alongside of the worthiest of our native Earls we place the glorious name of Simon the Righteous. A stranger, but a stranger who came to our shores to claim lands and honours which were his lawful heritage, he became our leader against strangers of another mould, against the adventurers who thronged the court of a King who turned his back on his own people. The first noble of England, the brother-in-law of the King, he threw in his lot, not with princes or nobles, but with the whole people. He was the chosen leader of England in his life, and in death he was worshipped as her martyr. In those days religion coloured every feeling; the patriot who stood up for right and freedom was honoured alongside of him who suffered for his faith. We fill our streets and market-places with the statues of worthies of later days; Peel and Herbert and Lewis and Cobden yet live among us in bronze or marble. In those days honour to the statesman was not well distinguished from worship to the saint, and Waltheof and Simon and Thomas of Lancaster(42) were hailed as sainted patrons of England, and wonders were held to be wrought by their relics or at their tombs. The poets of three languages vied in singing the praises of the man who strove and suffered for right, and Simon, the guardian of England on the field and in the senate, was held to be her truer guardian still in the heavenly places from which our fathers deemed that the curse of Rome had no power to shut him out(43).

The great work of the martyred Earl had a strange destiny. His personal career was cut short, his political work was brought to perfection, by a rival and a kinsman only less to be honoured than himself. On the field of Evesham Simon died and Edward triumphed. But it was on Edward that Simon’s mantle fell; it was to his destroyer that he handed on the torch which fell from his dying grasp. For a moment his work seemed to have died with him; for some years Parliaments were still summoned which were not after the model of the great Assembly which answered to the writs of the captive Henry. But the model still lived in men’s hearts, and presently the wisdom of the great Edward saw that his uncle’s gift could no longer be denied to his people. Parliaments after Simon’s model have been called together in unbroken succession from Edward’s day to our own(44). Next to the name of Simon we may honour the name of Edward himself and the names of the worthies who withstood him. To Roger Bigod of Norfolk and Humfrey Bohun of Hereford we owe the crowning of the work(45). The Parliament of England was now wrought into the fulness of its perfect form, and the most homely, but not the least important, of its powers was now fully acknowledged. No tax or gift could the King of England claim at the hands of Englishmen save such as the Lords and Commons of England had granted him of their free will(46).

Thus we may say that, in the time of Edward the First, the English Constitution definitely put on the same essential form which it has kept ever since. The germs of King, Lords, and Commons we had brought with us from our older home eight hundred years before. But, from King Edward’s days onwards, we have King, Lords, and Commons themselves, in nearly the same outward shape, with nearly the same strictly legal powers, which they still keep. All the great principles of English freedom were already firmly established. There is indeed a wide difference between the political condition of England under Edward the First and the political condition of England in our own day. But the difference lies far more in the practical working of the Constitution than in its outward form. The changes have been many; but a large portion of those changes have not been formal enactments, but those silent changes whose gradual working has wrought out for us a conventional Constitution existing alongside of our written Law. Other changes have been simply improvements in detail; others have been enactments made to declare more clearly, or to secure more fully in practice, those rights whose existence was not denied. But, speaking generally, and allowing for the important class of conventional understandings which have never been clothed with the form of written enactments, the main elements of the English Constitution remain now as they were fixed then. From that time English constitutional history is not merely an inquiry, however interesting and instructive, into something which has passed away. It is an inquiry into something which still lives; it is an inquiry into laws which, whenever they have not been formally repealed, are in full force at this day. Up to the reign of Edward the First English history is strictly the domain of antiquaries. From the reign of Edward the First it becomes the domain of lawyers(47).

We find then—it will be understood with what qualifications I am speaking—the English Constitution fully grown by the end of the thirteenth century, and we find it to be, in the shape which it then took, the work of Earl Simon of Montfort and of King Edward the First. Now there are several points in which the shape which our Constitution thus finally took differed from the shapes which were taken by most of the kindred Constitutions on the Continent. The usual form taken by a national or provincial assembly in the middle ages was that of an Assembly of Estates. That is to say, it consisted of representatives of all those classes in the nation which were possessed of political rights. These in most countries were three, Nobles, Clergy, and Commons. And the name of the Three Estates, that is the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons, is equally well known in England, though the meaning of the three names differs not a little in England from what it meant elsewhere. In England we never had, unless it were in the old days of the Eorlas, a Nobility such as is understood by that name in other countries. Elsewhere the nobles formed a distinct class, a class into which it was perhaps not absolutely impossible for those who were beneath it to be raised, but from which it was at least absolutely impossible for any of its members to come down. Whatever the privileges of the noble might be, they extended to all his children and their children for ever and ever. In some countries his titles descend in this way to all his descendants; all the children of a Duke, for instance, are Dukes and Duchesses. In France, and in most other countries where the system of Estates existed, the Estate of the Nobles in the National Assembly was a representation, in some shape or other, of the whole class of nobles as a distinct body. How different this is from our House of Lords I need not point out. In strictness, I repeat, we have no nobility. The seats in our Upper Chamber go by descent and not by election or nomination; but no political privilege attaches to the children of their holders. Even the eldest son of the peer, the future holder of the peerage, is a commoner as long as his father lives. Whatever titles he bears are simply titles of courtesy which carry with them no political privileges above other commoners. Nay, we may go higher still. As the children of the peer have no special advantage, so neither have the younger children of the King himself. The King’s wife, his eldest son, his eldest daughter, his eldest son’s wife, all have special privileges by Law. His other children are simple commoners, unless their father thinks good to raise them, as he may raise any other of his subjects, to the rank of peerage(48). There is perhaps no feature in our Constitution more important and more beneficial than this, which binds all ranks together, and which has hindered us from suffering at any time under the curse of a noble caste. Yet this marked distinction between our own Constitution and that of most other countries is purely traditional. We cannot say that it was enacted by any particular man or in any particular Assembly. But it is easy to see that the fact that in England our national Assemblies always went on in some shape or other, that the right of all freemen to attend in person was never formally abolished, that the King kept the right of specially summoning whom he would, all helped to hinder the growth of an exclusive noble caste. The aristocratic sentiment, the pride of birth, has doubtless been very strong at all times. But it has been merely a sentiment, resting on no legal foundation. The Crown could always ennoble any one; but the nobility so granted belonged to one only of the family at the time, to the actual owner of the peerage. All ranks could at all times freely intermarry; all offices were open to all freemen; and England, unlike Germany, never saw ecclesiastical foundations whose members were bound to be of noble birth.

The position of the Estate of the Clergy was also widely different in England from what it was in other countries. In fact the political position of the Clergy has, ever since Edward the First, been something utterly anomalous and inconsistent. Elsewhere the representatives of the Clergy, just like those of the Nobles, formed one distinct Estate in the Assembly. In England the great Prelates had seats in the House of Lords, where the Bishops keep them still. But there also existed the anomalous body called Convocation, whose character has always fluctuated between that of an ecclesiastical Synod and that of a parliamentary Estate of the realm(49). The Clergy are still summoned along with every Parliament; and one distinctly parliamentary function they held down to the reign of Charles the Second, which was then taken away without any formal enactment. It was one of our great constitutional principles established in King Edward’s days that no tax could be granted to the King except by those who had to pay it. But for a long time the Lords and the Commons taxed themselves separately, and the Clergy in their Convocation taxed themselves separately also. And, till this power was given up, an ecclesiastical benefice gave no right to vote in the election of members of the House of Commons(50).

The Commons too themselves bear a name which had a far different meaning in England from what it bore elsewhere. The usage by which the Knights of the shire and the Citizens and Burgesses were brought together in a single House, whatever was its origin, whether it were at first the result of design or of happy accident, has been an usage no less wholesome, no less needful to our full constitutional developement, than that which decreed that the children of peers should be commoners. In most other countries the class of men who were returned as representatives of the counties, the Knights of the Shire, would have been members of the Estate of the Nobles. In France the words nobleman and gentleman had the same meaning, that of the members of an exclusive aristocratic caste. The Commons, the Third Estate, consisted of the citizens of the privileged towns only(51). But in England the middle class was not confined to the towns; it spread itself, in the form of a lesser gentry and a wealthy yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. That class, the smaller landowners, was for a long time the strength of the country, and the happiest results came from the union of their representatives in a single chamber with those of the cities and boroughs. Each class gained strength from its fellowship with the other, and the citizen class gained, from their union on equal terms with the landed gentry, a consideration which otherwise they might never have reached. In short, the union of the two, the union of all classes of freemen except the clergy and the actual members of the peerage, of all classes from the peer’s eldest son to the smallest freeholder or burgess, made the House of Commons a real representation of the whole nation, and not of any single order in the nation.

Mark again that the form of government which political writers call bi-cameral, that is to say, where the Legislative Assembly consists of two Chambers or Houses, arose out of one of the accidents of English History. The merits of that form of government are now freely under discussion, but it is assumed on both sides that the only choice lies between one chamber and two; no one proposes to have three or four(52). But most of the continental bodies of Estates consisted, as we have seen, of three Houses; in Sweden, where the peasants, the small freeholders, were important enough to be separately represented alongside of the Nobles, Clergy, and Citizens, there were till lately four(53). The number two became the number of our Houses of Parliament, not out of any conviction of the advantages of that number, but because it was found impossible to get the Clergy in England habitually to act, as they did elsewhere, as a regular member of the parliamentary body. They shrank from the burthen, or they deemed secular legislation inconsistent with their profession. Thus, instead of the Clergy forming, as they did in France, a distinct Estate of the Legislature, we got a Parliament of two Houses, Lords and Commons, attended by a kind of ecclesiastical shadow of the Parliament in the shape of the two Houses of the ecclesiastical Convocation. Thus, for all practical purposes, there were only two Estates in the English Parliament, Lords and Commons. Thus the phrase of the Three Estates, which had a meaning in France, became meaningless in England. For centuries back there has been no separate Estate of the Clergy; some of their highest members have belonged to the Estate of the Lords, and the rest to the Estate of the Commons. Hence has arisen a common but not unnatural misconception, a misconception as old as the days of the Long Parliament, as to the meaning of the phrase of the Three Estates. Men constantly use those words as if they meant the three elements among which the legislative power is divided, King, Lords, and Commons. But an Estate means a rank or order or class of men, like the Lords, the Clergy, or the Commons. The King is not an Estate, because there is no class or order of Kings, the King being one person alone by himself. The proper phrase is the King and the three Estates of the Realm. But in England, as I have already shown, the phrase is meaningless, as we have in truth two Estates only(54).

We thus had in England, not an Estate of Nobles, forming a distinct class from the people, but an Upper House of hereditary and official Lords, whose privileges were purely personal, and whose children had no political privilege above other men. Our Bishops and some other of our ecclesiastical dignitaries had seats in the Upper House, but there was no distinct Estate of the Clergy, having its distinct voice in legislation. Our Lower House, lower in name, but gradually to become upper in real power, came to represent, not merely the inhabitants of privileged towns, but the whole nation, with the single exception of the personal holders of hereditary or official seats in the Upper House. That such an Assembly should gradually draw to itself all the real powers of the state was in the nature of things; but it was only gradually that it did so. Few things in our parliamentary history are more remarkable than the way in which the two Houses have for the most part worked together. I am not talking of very modern times, but of times when the two Houses were really coordinate powers in the state. During the six hundred years that the two Houses have lived side by side, serious disputes between them have been very rare, and those disputes which have happened have generally had to do with matters of form and privilege which were chiefly interesting to members of the two Houses themselves, not with questions which had any great importance for the nation at large(55). For a while the Commons followed the lead of the Lords; then the Lords came gradually to follow the lead of the Commons; but open and violent breaches between the Houses have been rare indeed. From the days of Earl Simon onwards, both the power of Parliament as a whole, and the special power of the House of Commons, was constantly growing. The Parliaments of the fourteenth century exercised all the powers which our Parliament exercises now, together with some which modern Parliaments shrink from exercising. That is to say, the Parliaments of those days were obliged either to do directly or to leave undone many things which the developement of political conventionality enables a modern Parliament to do indirectly. The ancient Parliaments demanded the dismissal of the King’s ministers; they regulated his personal household; they put his authority into commission; if need called for such a step, they put forth their last and greatest power and deposed him from his kingly office. In those days a change of government, a change of policy, the getting rid of a bad minister and the putting a better in his place, were things which never could be done without an open struggle between King and Parliament; often they could not be done without the bondage, the imprisonment, or the death, perhaps only of the minister, perhaps even of the King himself. The same ends can now be gained by a vote of censure in the House of Commons; in many cases they can be gained even without a vote of censure, by the simple throwing out of a measure by which a Ministry has given out that it will stand or fall(56).

The fifteenth century, as compared with the thirteenth and fourteenth, was in some respects a time in which things went back. It is plain that the Parliaments of that day were bodies which were much less independent than the Parliaments of earlier times. During the Wars of the Roses each successive military victor found a Parliament ready to confirm his claim to the Crown and to decree the condemnation of his enemies(57). And it was a Parliament of Henry the Sixth which passed the most reactionary measure which any Parliament ever did pass, that by which the qualification for a county elector was narrowed to those freeholders whose estates were of the yearly value of forty shillings(58). In this case time and the change in the value of money have redressed the wrong; there may be freeholders whose estates are under the value of forty shillings, but I cannot think that they are now a very large or important class. But, to understand the meaning of the restriction in the fifteenth century, for forty shillings we may fairly read forty pounds; and certainly, if we struck off the register all those electors whose qualification is a freehold—much more those whose qualification is an estate less than a freehold—under the value of forty pounds, the lessening of the constituencies of our counties would not be small. On the other hand, during the revolutionary times which followed, we more than once hear of direct appeals to the people which remind us of days far earlier. Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third were chosen Kings, or at least had their claims to the Crown acknowledged, by gatherings of the citizens of London which remind us of the wars of Stephen and Matilda(59). Still even in this age, the power of Parliament was advancing(60); the anxiety of every pretender to get a parliamentary sanction for his claims was a sign of the growing importance of Parliament, and we get incidental notices which show that a seat in the House of Commons, and that not as a knight of a shire, but as a burgess of a borough, was now an object of ambition for men of the class from which knights of the shire were chosen, and even for the sons of members of the Upper House(61).

At last came the sixteenth century, the time of trial for parliamentary institutions in so many countries of Europe. Not a few assemblies which had once been as free as our own Parliament were, during that age, either utterly swept away or reduced to empty formalities. Then it was that Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second overthrew the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon; before long the States-General of France met for the last time before their last meeting of all on the eve of the great Revolution(62). In England parliamentary institutions were not swept away, nor did Parliament sink into an empty form. But, for a while, Parliaments, like all our other institutions, became perverted into instruments of tyranny. Under Henry the Eighth, Parliaments, like Judges, Juries, and ecclesiastical Synods, decreed whatever seemed good to the caprice of the despot. Why had they so fallen away from what they had been in a past age, from what they were to be again? The reason is plain; the Commons had not yet gained strength enough to act without the Lords, and the Lords had ceased to be an independent body. The old nobility had been cut off at Towton and Barnet, and the new nobility were the abject slaves of the King to whom they owed their honours. A century later, the new nobility had inherited the spirit of the old, and the Commons had grown to the fulness of their power. Thus it came that we find in the Parliaments of the sixteenth century an abject submission to a tyrant’s will, of which we find no sign in the Parliaments either of the fourteenth or of the seventeenth. Very different indeed from the Parliaments which overthrew Richard the Second and Charles the First were the Parliaments which, almost without a question, passed bills of attainder against any man against whom Henry’s caprice had turned, the Parliaments which, in the great age of religious controversy, were ever ready to enforce by every penalty that particular shade of doctrine which for the moment commended itself to the Defender of the Faith, to his son or to his daughters. Why, it may be asked, in such a state of things, did not parliamentary institutions perish in England as they perished in so many other lands? It might be enough to say that no ruler had an interest in destroying institutions which he found that he could so conveniently turn to his own purposes. But why did not those institutions sink into mere forms, which they certainly did not do, even in the worst times? One reason undoubtedly is that special insular position of our country which has in so many other ways given a peculiar turn to our history. The great foe of parliamentary institutions was the introduction of standing armies. But the sovereign of England, shut up within his island, had far less need of a standing army than the sovereigns of the Continent, engaged as they were in their ceaseless wars with neighbours on their frontiers. But I believe that the personal character of Henry the Eighth had a great deal to do with the final preservation of our liberties. Do not for a moment fancy that I belong to that school of paradox which sets up Henry the Eighth as a virtuous and beneficent ruler. Do not think that I claim for him any feelings of direct thankfulness such as I do claim for Earl Simon and King Edward. The position of Henry is more like the position of William the Conqueror, though I certainly hold that the Conqueror was in everything the better man of the two. Both served the cause of freedom indirectly, and both served it by means of features in the personal character of each. In one respect indeed William and Henry stood in utterly different positions towards England. William was a stranger, and it was largely because he was a stranger that he was able to do us indirect good. Henry, with all his crimes, was a thorough Englishman; throughout his reign there was a sympathy between him and the mass of his subjects, who, after all, did not greatly suffer by the occasional beheading of a Queen or a Duke. But the despotism of William and the despotism of Henry agreed in this, that each, even in his worst deeds, retained a scrupulous regard for the letter of the Law. In the case of William this is not hard to see for any one who carefully studies the records of his age(63); in the case of Henry it stands boldly proclaimed in the broadest facts of English history. While his fellow-tyrants abroad were everywhere overthrowing free institutions, Henry was in all things showing them the deepest outward respect. Throughout his reign he took care to do nothing except in outward and regular legal form, nothing for which he could not shelter himself under the sanction either of precedent or of written Law. In itself, this perversion of Law, this clothing of wrong with the garb of right, is really worse—at all events it is more corrupting—than deeds of open violence against which men are tempted openly to revolt. But such a tyranny as Henry’s is one form of the homage which vice pays to virtue; the careful preservation of the outward forms of freedom makes it easier for another and happier generation again to kindle the form into its ancient spirit and life. Every deed of wrong done by Henry with the assent of Parliament was in truth a witness to the abiding importance of Parliament; the very degradation of our ancient Constitution was a step to its revival with new strength and in a more perfect form(64).

A like witness to the importance of Parliament in this age was shown in two other very remarkable ways, whereby the power and importance of the House of Commons was acknowledged in the very act of corrupting it. One was the active interference of the Government in parliamentary elections; the other was the creation of boroughs in order to be corrupt. One needs no stronger proofs than these of the importance of the body which it was found needful thus to pack and to manage. The Crown still kept the power of summoning members from any boroughs which it thought fit, and throughout the Tudor reigns the power was freely abused by sending writs to places which were likely to return members who would be subservient to the Court(65). Thus arose many of the wretched little boroughs in Cornwall and elsewhere which were disfranchised by our successive Reform Bills. These boroughs, which always were corrupt and which were created in order to be corrupt, must be carefully distinguished from another class which perished with them. Many towns to which Earl Simon and King Edward sent writs decayed in process of time; sometimes they decayed positively; more commonly they decayed relatively, by being utterly outstripped by younger towns and so losing the importance which they had once had. The disfranchisement of both classes was equally just; but the different history of the two classes should be carefully borne in mind. It was right to take away its members from Old Sarum, but there had been a time when it was right to give Old Sarum members. In the case of a crowd of Cornish boroughs, it not only was right to take away their members, but they never ought to have had members at all(66).

It was in the days of Elizabeth that something of the ancient spirit again breathed forth. It is then that we come to the beginning of that long line of parliamentary worthies which stretches on in unbroken order from her days to our own. A few daring spirits in the Commons’ House now began once more to speak in tones worthy of those great Assemblies which had taught the Edwards and the Richards that there was a power in England mightier than their own(67). Under the puny successor of the great Queen the voice of freedom was heard more loudly(68). In the next reign the great strife of all came, and a King of England once more, as in the days of Henry and Simon, stood forth in arms against his people to learn that the power of his people was a greater power than his. But in the seventeenth century, just as in the thirteenth, men did not ask for any rights and powers which were admitted to be new; they asked only for the better security of those rights and powers which had been handed on from days of old. Into the details of that great struggle and of the times which followed it is not my purpose to enter. I have traced at some length the origin and growth of our Constitution from the earliest times to its days of special trial in the days of Tudor and Stewart despotism. Our later constitutional history rather belongs to an inquiry of another kind. It is mainly a record of silent changes in the practical working of institutions whose outward and legal form remained untouched. I will therefore end my consecutive historical sketch—if consecutive it can claim to be—at the point which we have now reached. Instead of carrying on any regular constitutional narrative into times nearer to our own, I will rather choose, as the third part of my subject, the illustration of one of the special points with which I set out, namely the power which our gradual developement has given us of retracing our steps, of falling back, whenever need calls for falling back, on the principles of earlier, often of the earliest, times. Wittingly or unwittingly, much of our best modern legislation has, as I have already said, been a case of advancing by the process of going back. As the last division of the work which I have taken in hand, I shall try to show in how many cases we have, as a matter of fact, gone back from the cumbrous and oppressive devices of feudal and royalist lawyers to the sounder, freer, and simpler principles of the days of our earliest freedom.