nd individual civil rights, which was dictated by the
original and ever-present necessity of military organization and defense.

The Anglo-Saxon idea, on the other hand, looked first to the individual.
In the early days of English history, without theorizing much upon the
subject, the Anglo-Saxons began to work out their political institutions
along the line expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the
individual citizen has certain inalienable rights--the right to life, to
liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, and that government is not the source
of these rights, but is the instrument for the preservation and promotion
of them. So when a century and a half after the conquest the barons of
England set themselves to limit the power of the Crown they did not demand
a grant of rights. They asserted the rights of individual freedom and
demanded observance of them, and they laid the corner-stone of our system
of government in this solemn pledge of the Great Charter:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseized of his free
hold, or his liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled,
or otherwise destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by
the law of the land."

Again and again in the repeated confirmations of the Great Charter, in the
Petition of Rights, in the Habeas Corpus Act, in the Bill of Rights, in
the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, in the Virginia Bill of Rights, and,
finally, in the immortal Declaration of 1776--in all the great utterances
of striving for broader freedom which have marked the development of modern
liberty, sounds the same dominant note of insistence upon the inalienable
right of individual manhood under government but independent of government,
and, if need be, against government, to life and liberty.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the consequences which
followed from these two distinct and opposed theories of government. The
one gave us the dominion, but also the decline and fall of, Rome. It
followed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, with the negation of
those rights in the oppression of the Reign of Terror, the despotism of
Napoleon, the popular submission to the second empire and the subservience
of the individual citizen to official superiority which still prevails so
widely on the continent of Europe. The tremendous potency of the other
subdued the victorious Normans to the conquered Saxon's concep