as we
may owe to French sceptics and Swiss religionists. This belief is
confirmed by a book I have just read by Hannis Taylor on the "Origin and
Growth of the English Constitution." It is not an artistic history, by
any means, but one in which the author has brought out the recent
investigations of Edward Freeman, John Richard Green, Bishop Stubbs,
Professor Gneist of Berlin, and others, who with consummate learning
have gone to the roots of things,--some of whom, indeed, are dry
writers, regardless of style, disdainful of any thing but facts, which
they have treated with true scholastic minuteness. It appears from these
historians, as quoted by Taylor, and from other authorities to which the
earlier writers on English history had no access, that the germs of our
free institutions existed among the Anglo-Saxons, and were developed to
a considerable extent among their Norman conquerors in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, when barons extorted charters from kings in
their necessities, and when the common people of Saxon origin secured
valuable rights and liberties, which they afterwards lost under the
Tudor and Stuart princes. I need not go into a detail of these. It is
certain that in the reign of Edward I. (1274-1307), himself a most
accomplished and liberal civil ruler, the English House of Commons had
become very powerful, and had secured in Parliament the right of
originating money bills, and the control of every form of taxation,--on
the principle that the people could not be taxed without their own
consent. To this principle kings gave their assent, reluctantly indeed,
and made use of all their statecraft to avoid compliance with it, in
spite of their charters and their royal oaths. But it was a political
idea which held possession of the minds of the people from the reign of
Edward I. to that of Henry IV. During this period all citizens had the
right of suffrage in their boroughs and towns, in the election of
certain magistrates. They were indeed mostly controlled by the lord of
the manor and by the parish priest, but liberty was not utterly
extinguished in England, even by Norman kings and nobles; it existed to
a greater degree than in any continental State out of Italy. It cannot
be doubted that there was a constitutional government in England as
early as in the time of Edward I., and that the power of kings was even
then checked by parliamentary laws.

In Freeman's "Norman Conquest," it appears that the