institutions, as an organism consists of many minor ones. Our Congress is a real institution, but its component parts, the Senate and House of Representatives, are its constituent institutions, and the whole is in close connexion with other real institutions, for instance, the state legislatures, or it depends upon other institutions, for instance, the common law.

Yet the self-government of our country or of England would be considered by us little more than oil floating on the surface of the water, did it consist only in Congress and the state legislatures with us, and in Parliament in England. Self-government, to be of a penetrative character, requires the institutional self-government of the county or district; it requires that everything which, without general inconvenience, can be left to the circle to which it belongs, be thus left to its own management; it consists in the presenting grand jury, in the petty jury, in the fact that much which is called on the European Continent the administrative branch, be left to the people. It requires, in one word, all the local appliances of government which are termed local selfgovernment; and Niebuhr says that British liberty depends at least as much on these as on Parliament, and in contradistinction to them he calls the governments of the Continent Staats-Regierungen (state governments,

4 T. Toulmin Smith's Local Self-government and Centralization, &c. London, 1851.

A work which many of my readers will peruse with interest and instruction is Ferdinand Béchard's Lois Municipales des Républiques de la Suisse et des États-Unis, Paris, 1852. M. Béchard is also the author of a Traité de l'Administration Intérieure de la France-a work which must be welcome to every inquiring citizen, because it pictures the details of French centralization, probably the most consistently carried out centralization in existence.

M. Béchard uses repeatedly in his French work the English term selfgovernment.

meaning governments directing all detail by the general and supreme power).5

It must be in view of this local self-government, combined with parliamentary freedom, that Sir Edward Coke said of the Justice of the Peace: "It is such a form of subordinate government for the tranquillity and quiet of the realm as no part of the Christian world hath the like, if the same be duly executed."

Anglican self-government requires that every institution of local self-government shall have the right to pass such by-laws as it finds necessary for its own government, without obtaining the consent of any superior power, even that of the crown or parliament, and that of course such by-laws shall stand good in the courts of law, and shall be as binding upon every one concerned as any statute or law. I believe that it is in the Anglican system of liberty alone, that by-laws are enacted and have full force without consent of superior power. There

5 A German work, the translated title of which is-An Account of the Internal Administration of Great Britain, by Baron de Vincke, edited by B. G. Niebuhr. Berlin, 1815. Niebuhr, who had spent a part of his early manhood in England, published, and probably modelled in a great measure, this work, in order to influence, if possible, the Prussian government to reorganize the state after the expulsion of the French, and to reclaim that kingdom from the centralization it had adopted in many respects from the invaders of Germany. Niebuhr was a follower and great admirer of Baron de Stein, who, when minister of Prussia, had given to the cities some degree of self-government by his Städte-Ordnung-causing not a little umbrage to Napoleon. Niebuhr desired to give increased life to the principles contained in the Cities' Charter, when he published the work I have mentioned.

• Coke's Institutes, part 10, ch. xxi. Justices of the Peace. The Earl of Strafford, who, like his royal master, died so well, after, politically speaking, having lived so ill, bade his brother, on the scaffold, to take this, among other messages, to his eldest son: "Wish him to content himself to be a servant to his country, as a justice of the peace in his county, not aiming at higher preferment." May 12, 1641. Rushworth (who was on the scaffold) vol. viii. p. 760. George Washington, after having aided in founding a great commonwealth, and after having been twice its chief magistrate, was a justice of the peace in his county, in which he was imitated by John Adams, and, perhaps, by many of the other ex-presidents.

are in other countries exceptions, but they are rare indeed, and very limited in power, while the by-law is the rule in our system. The whole subject of the by-law is characteristic and important, and stands out like the comprehensive and peculiar doctrine of the Anglican warrant. The character of self-government is moreover manifested by the fact that the right of making by-laws is not derived from any grant of superior power, but has been ever considered in the English polity as inherent in the local community-a natural right of the freemen. Coke says, with reference to these laws and their force: "Of more force is the agreement of the folk and people than the grant of the king." And in another place he says: "The inhabitants of a town, without any custom, may make ordinances or by-laws for any such thing which is for the general good of the public, unless indeed it be pretended by any such by-law to abridge the general liberty of the people, their inherent birthright, assured to all by the common law of the whole land, and which that common law, in its jealous regard for liberty, does not allow to be abrogated or lessened even by their own consent-much less, therefore, by the consent of their delegates in parliament.”

9

8

It may be added that by-law does not mean, as many suppose, additional law, law by the side of another or complementary; but it means law of the place or community, law of the bye or pye, that is, of the collection of dwellers, or of the settlement, as we in America, perhaps, would most naturally express it.10

78 Reports, p. 125.

5 Reports, p. 63.

9 Ibid. p. 64.

10 See Smith's Local Self-government, page 230. The quotations from Coke to which the three last notes refer are likewise in Smith s work, which I recommend to every reader.

By, in by-law, is the same syllable with which the names of many English places end, such as Derby, Whitby, and is etymologically the same with the German Bauen (to build, to settle, to cultivate), which is of the same root with the Gothic Bua and Boo, and especially the frequentative Bygga, aedificare. See Adelung ad verbum Bauen. It is a word which runs through all the Teutonic languages, ancient and modern.

Gradually, indeed, bye-laws came to signify laws for a limited circle, a small society, laws which any set of men have the right to pass for themselves within and under the superior law, charter, &c., which constitutes them into a society, and thus it happened that bye-law was changed into by-law, as we have by-ways, roads by the side of others. It cannot be denied that by-law at present is used in the sense of law passed by the side, as it were, of another and main law. Very few persons know of the origin, and the present sense of by-law is doubtless that of collateral, expletive, or subordinate law. Such double derivations are not uncommon in our language. The scholar is probably reminded, by this note, of the term God, which we Christians derive from good, and a better, holier derivation, as to the sense of the word, we cannot give to it; yet the historical derivation, the verbal etymology, if I might so say, is an entirely different See Jacob Grimm's German Mythology, ad verbum Gott. The starting-point of adoration is, with all tribes, dread, acknowledgment of superior power; then follows acknowledgment of wisdom, and last of all acknowledgment of goodness, purity, holiness.

one.

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CHAPTER XXVII.

EFFECTS AND USES OF INSTITUTIONAL SELF-GOVERN

MENT.

In order fully to appreciate institutional self-government, and not unconsciously to enjoy its blessings, as most of us enjoy the breath of life without reflecting on the organ of respiration and the atmosphere we inhale, it is necessary to present to our minds clearly and repeatedly, as we pass through life and read the past, what effects it produces on the individual, on society, and on whole periods, and how it acts far beyond the limits of its own country.

The advantages of institutional liberty and organized self-government, diffused over a whole country or state, and penetrating with its quickening power all the branches of government, may be briefly summed up in the following way.

Institutional self-government trains the mind and nourishes the character for a dependence upon law and a habit of liberty, as well as of a law-abiding acknowledgment of authority. It educates for freedom. It cultivates civil dignity in all the partakers, and teaches to respect the rights of others. It has thus a gentlemanly character. It brings home palpable liberty to all, and gives a consciousness of freedom, rights and corresponding obligations, such as no other system does. It is the only self-government which is a real government of self, as well as by self, and indeed is the only real self-govern