udged by the
courts of law in each concrete case as it arises.

Every one of these five characteristics of the government established by
the Constitution was a distinct advance beyond the ancient attempts at
popular government, and the elimination of any one of them would be a
retrograde movement and a reversion to a former and discarded type of
government. In each case it would be the abandonment of a distinctive
feature of government which has succeeded, in order to go back and try
again the methods of government which have failed. Of course we ought
not to take such a backward step except under the pressure of inevitable
necessity.

The first two of the characteristics which I have enumerated, those which
embrace the conception of representative government and the conception of
individual liberty, were the products of the long process of development of
freedom in England and America. They were not invented by the makers of the
Constitution. They have been called inventions of the Anglo-Saxon race.
They are the chief contributions of that race to the political development
of civilization.

The expedient of representation first found its beginning in the Saxon
witenagemot. It was lost in the Norman conquest. It was restored step by
step, through the centuries in which parliament established its power as an
institution through the granting or withholding of aids and taxes for the
king's use. It was brought to America by the English colonists. It was the
practice of the colonies which formed the Federal Union. It entered into
the constitution as a matter of course, because it was the method by which
modern liberty had been steadily growing stronger and broader for six
centuries as opposed to the direct, unrepresentative method of government
in which the Greek and Roman and Italian republics had failed. This
representative system has in its turn impressed itself upon the nations
which derived their political ideas from Rome and has afforded the method
through which popular liberty has been winning forward in its struggle
against royal and aristocratic power and privilege the world over.
Bluntschli, the great Heidelberg publicist of the last century, says:

"Representative government and self-government are the great works of
the English and American peoples. The English have produced
representative monarchy with parliamentary legislation and
parliamentary government. The Americans have produced the
repr