nd the lights of the most matured philosophy. Since
the masterly book of Hallam was written, both political thought and
historical knowledge have gained much, and we might have a treatise
applying our strengthened calculus to our augmented facts. I do not
pretend that I could write such a book, but there are a few salient
particulars which may be fitly brought together, both because of their
past interest and of their present importance.

[12] Since the first edition of this book was published several
valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light
on our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs' Select
Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History,
from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman's
lecture on "The Growth of the English Constitution," and the chapter on
the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his History of the Norman Conquest: but
we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject
such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and as it is
most desirable that we should have.

There is a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in
all the rude nations that have attained civilisation. These nations
seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative
absolutism. The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not
absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress
rebellion, no organised ESPIONAGE to spy out discontent, no skilled
bureaucracy to smooth the ruts of obedient life. The early king was
indeed consecrated by a religious sanction; he was essentially a man
apart, a man above others, divinely anointed or even God-begotten. But
in nations capable of freedom this religious domination was never
despotic. There was indeed no legal limit; the very words could not be
translated into the dialect of those times. The notion of law as we
have it--of a rule imposed by human authority, capable of being altered
by that authority, when it likes, and in fact, so altered
habitually--could not be conveyed to early nations, who regarded law
half as an invincible prescription, and half as a Divine revelation.
Law "came out of the king's mouth"; he gave it as Solomon gave
judgment--embedded in the particular case, and upon the authority of
Heaven as well as his own. A Divine limit to the Divine revealer was
impossible, and there was no other source of law. But though there