6 ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS 



and, applying their wisdom to the reform, the change, or amendment 

 of their constitution, took as their guide the circumstances and the 

 wants of the age, in the midst of which it was their destiny to live. 

 No Englishman who is at all acquainted with the history and consti- 

 tution o£ his country will ever believe that the far-famed English 

 liberty forms a part of his undoubted birthright ; nor will he be so 

 blind as to consider it as a patrimony descended to him, in its present 

 form, through a long series of generations. No : on the contrary, 

 those who can bestow a cool and scrutinizing attention to the merits 

 and the rise and progress of their noble constitution, will not fail to 

 perceive that, like the massive rock, its base, its heart, and summit, 

 were not framed by one sudden stroke of creative power, but that its 

 majestic growth had been nourished and consolidated, by the action 

 of generally imperceptible influences, throughout the course of many 

 centuries. The origin and guarantee, then, of English liberty, must 

 be sought in general circumstances rather than the wisdom of legis- 

 latures ; and it must, also, be apparent that the forms and provisions 

 of the constitution are more to be considered the effect than the cause 

 of that liberty. Indeed, we meet with frequent instances which evi- 

 dently show that the spirit of liberty never failed to enlist under her 

 pure-white banner the existing forms and laws of society, sometimes 

 combatting with their aid, and not infrequently in despite of them. 



The enthusiastic industry with which many political historians have 

 searched, since Montesquieu, not only for the germs, but even for the 

 fruit and forms of liberty in the forests of Germany, has some resem- 

 blance to that school of authors of the later period of the Roman 

 Empire, who, ever since Plutarch, have vented their angry feelings 

 against the order of things in which they lived by extolling the merits 

 and the glory of the little republics of Greece. Their speculations 

 might have proved harmless if they had not now and then over- 

 stepped the confines of school learning and theories, and attempted to 

 apply them to immediate and practical life, after the manner of Her- 

 ault-Secheller, who entered into a disquisition of the laws of Crete 

 when the question was of those of his own country. 



It appears that the Saxon, like all the other Germanic tribes at 

 the time of the emigrating of nations, possessed among them, as re- 

 gards their social life, those axiomata infima, the first rude rules of 

 experience, which the wants and pressure of necessity never fail to 

 force upon a people in the earlier and crude period of their congrega- 

 tion. Moreover, they doubtless possessed also many regulations sus- 

 ceptible of improvement and refinement. But their constitution 



