ose special task and aim
seemed to be that of reducing to distinct form the principles which had
sprung into a new and vigorous life during the age which preceded it. As
the opening of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders,
creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, of rulers such
as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers,
administrators, framers of laws and institutions. It was to this class that
Edward himself belonged. He had little of creative genius, of political
originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion for order and
good government, the faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke
out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. In the
judicial reforms to which so much of his attention was directed he showed
himself, if not an "English Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted and
judicious man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape
which has borne the test of five centuries' experience the institutions of
his predecessors. If the excellence of a statesman's work is to be measured
by its duration and the faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the
growth and developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the
highest standard of excellence. Our law courts preserve to this very day
the form which he gave them. Mighty as has been the growth of our
Parliament, it has grown on the lines which he laid down. The great roll of
English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the Statutes of Edward.
The routine of the first Henry, the administrative changes which had been
imposed on the nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second,
were transformed under Edward into a political organization with
carefully-defined limits, directed not by the king's will alone but by the
political impulse of the people at large. His social legislation was based
in the same fashion on principles which had already been brought into
practical working by Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great measure
owing to this practical sense of its financial and administrative value
rather than to any foresight of its political importance that we owe
Edward's organization of our Parliament. But if the institutions which we
commonly associate with his name owe their origin to others, they owe their
form and their perpetuity to him.

[Sidenote: Constitutional Aspect of his Reign]

The king's English policy, like