and
increase the liberty of Englishmen, and diminish and destroy the
authority of the monarch, who is now only the personification of the
nation, the emblem of the Empire.

It is England's free institutions that, in Egypt, in Hongkong, in
Ceylon, in the Malay states, in India, have given the people of those
dark places some of the fruits of liberty to eat for the first time in
all the strange history of the oppressed and wasted Orient. And it is
our free institutions, as well as our Constitution, that in America
make kings impossible, and have, for a hundred years, wrought for a
larger liberty and a more popular government.

And it is the spirit of our institutions, as well as our Constitution,
that will prevent the abuse of power by American authority in Porto
Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, or any other spot blessed by the
protection of our flag. It is our free institutions, working now by
one method and now by another, after the fashion of our practical
race, that are establishing order, equal laws, free speech,
unpurchasable justice, and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" throughout our ocean possessions.

It is our institutional law, therefore, of which men should inquire
who would know the meaning and the life of our constitutional law. We
have heard from lawyer and orator of "the Constitution," "the letter
of the Constitution," etc.; we have listened for "our institutions,"
and in vain. And yet, is it not written that "the letter killeth, but
the spirit giveth life"?

Is it not written that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"? I respect not
the expounders of constitutional law who have not learned the history
of our institutions, of which the Constitution is the richest fruit,
until that history is a part of their being.

I respect not that constitutional charlatanism that fastens its eye on
the printed page alone, disdains our institutions as interpreting it,
and refuses to consider the sources of that Constitution--the
development of our present form of government for a century and a half
from the old crown charters; the English struggle for the rights of
man, regulated by equal laws which preceded that; the spirit of Dutch
independence, Dutch federation, and Dutch institutions working upon
that, and still back to the counsels of our Teuton fathers in the
German forests in the dim light of a far distant time.

If a people adopt a writ