cities that swayed over vast dominions as mistresses, but did not form part of a common State in the modern term.

In the middle ages liberty appears in a different phase. The Teutonic spirit of individual independence was one of the causes which led to the feudal system, and frequently prospered under it in rank disorder. There was no state proper in the middle ages; the feudal system is justly called a mere sysIt was no state; and medieval liberty appears in the shape of liberties, of franchises, singly chartered, separately conquered, individually arrogated—each society, party, or person obtaining as much as possible, unmindful of others, and each denying to others as much as might be conveniently done. The term freedom, therefore, came distinctly to signify, in the middle ages, not exactly the amount of free action allowed to the citizen or guaranteed to the person who enjoyed it, but the exemption from burdens and duties imposed upon others, or exacted in former times. Liberty had not yet acquired a substantive meaning, although it need not be mentioned that then as well as in ancient times, the principle which made noble hearts throb for liberty and independence, was the same that has made the modern martyrs of liberty mount the scaffold with confidence and reliance on the truth of their cause.

I am here again obliged to refer to the Political Ethics, where I have treated of this peculiarity of the middle ages in the chapter on the duties of the modern representative, contradistinguished from the medieval deputy.

The nearer we approach to modern times the more clearly we perceive two movements, which, at first glance, would appear to be destructive the one to the other. On the one hand states, in the present sense of the term, are formed. There is a distinct period in the history of our race, which may be aptly called the period of nationalization. Tribes, fragments, separate political societies, are united into nations, and politically they appear more and more as states. It is one of the many fortunate occurrences which have fallen to England in the course of her history, that she became nationalized at a comparatively very early period. The feudal system was

introduced at a late period, and as a royal measure. The king made the Norman-English nobility. The nobility did not make the king. The English nobility, therefore, could not resist the national movement and consolidation of the people into a nation, as it did on the continent, and, the crown thus not being obliged to gather all possible strength, in order to be able to subdue the baronial power, had not the opportunity to pass over into the concentrated principate, which was one of the political phases in every other part of Europe.1

On the other hand we observe that the priceless individual worth and value which Christianity gives to each human being, by making him an individually responsible being, with the highest duties and the highest privileges, together with advancing civilization, in a great measure produced by itselfthe Teutonic spirit of personal independence, connected not a little with the less impressionable, and therefore more tenacious, and sometimes dogged character of the Teutonic-all these combinedly, developed more and more the idea of individual rights, and the desire of protecting them.

These two facts have materially influenced the development

1 The history of no nation reminds the student so frequently of the fact that "His ways are not our ways," as that of England. Many events which have brought ruin elsewhere, served there, in the end, to obtain greater liberty and a higher nationality. The fact that the Norman nobility in England was the creature of the king-for this, doubtless, it was, although they came as Norman noblemen to the field of Hastings-is one of these remarkable circumstances. The English civil wars; the fact that most of England's monarchs have been indifferent persons, and that after Alfred the Great, but one truly great man has been among her kings; the inhospitable climate, which was treated by the people like a gauntlet thrown down by nature; and they developed that whole world of domestic comfort and well-being, known nowhere else, and of such important influence upon all her political life; her limited territory; her repeated change of language; her early conquests, these are some items of a list which might easily be extended.

Since this note was originally written, a work in praise of Henry VIII. has attracted sufficient attention to make it necessary for me to state that the author means William III. as the great monarch after Alfred.

of modern liberty, that liberty which we call our own. The progress we value so much was greatly retarded on the continent by an historical process which was universal among the nations of Europe, excepting those of Sclavonic origin, because they had not yet entered the lists of civilization.

The feudal system, of far greater power on the continent than in England, interfered with the process of nationalization and the formation of states proper. The people gradually rose to a higher position, a higher consciousness of rights, and the inhabitants of the cities generally found the baronial element hostile to them. The consequence was, that the crowns and the people united to break the power of the baron. But in the same degree as the struggle was tenacious, and the crown had used stronger power to subdue the feudal lord, it found itself unshackled when the struggle was over, and easily domineered over both the people and the lords. Then came the time of absorbing regal power, of centralization and monarchical absolutism, of government-states, as Niebuhr calls them. The liberties of the middle ages were gone; the principles of self-government were allowed to exist nowhere; and we find, at the present period only, the whole of the European continent, with the exception of Russia, as a matter of course, engaged in an arduous struggle to regain liberty, or rather to establish modern freedom. Everywhere the first ideas of the new liberty were taken from England, and, later, from the United States. The desire of possessing a well-guaranteed political liberty and enjoyment of free action, was kindled on the European continent by the example of England. The course which we observe in France, from Montesquieu, who, in his brilliant work on the Spirit of Laws, has chiefly England in view as a model, to the question at the beginning of the first French Revolution, whether the principles of British liberty should be adopted, was virtually repeated everywhere. The representative principle, the trial by jury, the liberty of the press, taxation and appropriations by the people's representatives, the division of power, the habeas corpus principle, publicity, and whatever else was prominent

in that liberty peculiar to the Anglican race, whether it had originated with it, or had been retained by it when elsewhere it had been lost in the general shipwreck of freedom, was longed for by the continental people, insisted on, or struggled

for.

It is well, then, to ask ourselves, in what does this Anglican liberty consist? The answer is important, in a general point of view, as well as because it is the broad foundation and frame-work of our own American liberty.

CHAPTER V.

ANGLICAN LIBERTY.

In order to ascertain in what this peculiar system of civil liberty consists, we must examine those charters of the whole Anglican race, which belong to "the times when governments chartered liberty," and to those "when the people charter governments." We must observe what principles, measures, and guarantees were most insisted upon in periods most distinguished by an active spirit of liberty, of opposition to encroaching power, or of a desire to prune public power so as to make it in future better harmonize with the claims of individual liberty. We must see what it is that the people of England and the people of America in great political periods have solemnly declared their rights and obligations. We must study the periods of a vigorous development of liberty, and we must weigh Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights-the three statutes which Lord Chatham called the Bible of the English Constitution. We must inquire into the public common law of England, and the common law as it has developed itself on this side of the Atlantic; and especially into the leading cases of political and constitutional importance that have been decided in England and the United. States.1 We must ponder our great federal pact, with the contemporaneous writers on this constitution, and the debates which led to its adoption after the failure of the original articles

1 A chronological table of the leading cases in England and the United States, by which great constitutional principles or essential individual rights have been settled and sown like a spreading, self-increasing plant, would be highly instructive, and show how much we owe to the growth of liberty, and how much this growth is owing to the husbanding of practical cases in the spirit of freedom.