ing
new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is
on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our
rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or
proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ,
conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of
England.

This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point
which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special
continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most
instructive part of the comparison between English history and the
history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the
many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one
Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and
barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every
institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth
century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young
indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very
things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a
King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor
impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high
hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of
the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen,
and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons
still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons
whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual
changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard
questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take
their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great
offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have
assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character
they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun;
doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but
statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions
of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is
rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few
great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy
yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists,