OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 7 



formed not the guarantees of general and national, but of individual 

 liberty ; the liberty of the owners and proprietors of land and manor, 

 to the injury of those who could not boast of such possessions, and 

 who were, in their inferior state of bondage and servitude, scarcely a 

 grade differing from that of real slaves. It is probable that the states- 

 right of the Saxons was more congenial with the spirit of the people 

 of that day than we suspect, and it may have worked well within its 

 limited sphere ; but it was by no means calculated for a more ex- 

 tended range of society, or capable of sustaining more noble purposes. 

 How little value the Saxons themselves set even on those statutes 

 which were capable of improvement and application to a wider fabric 

 of society, is clearly evident from the facility and willingness with 

 which they exchanged them for more despotic ones : a circumstance 

 which can be explained only by the casualty to which those regula- 

 tions owed their existence, and in which the moral conviction of their 

 validity was far from participating. Their elective offices were easily 

 converted into hereditary rights ; and the previous equality of the 

 landholders gave way by a series of services, as required from them 

 by the feudal system, to foreign as well as private privileges. The 

 Anglo-Saxon chiefs who came over to England at the head of their 

 own retinue, had, it would appear, as the victorious lords of the con- 

 quered aborigines, but little cause to trouble themselves with the 

 introduction of new laws into the subdued provinces other than those 

 of their own country, so favourable to their individual personal 

 rights. Historians and antiquarians have long disputed about the na- 

 ture and spirit of the constitution which the Anglo-Saxons introduced 

 into the new countries founded by them. All parties seem to build 

 their surmises on the strange supposition that slavery, originating in 

 an early stage of civilization, ought not to yield to the civilization of 

 succeeding ages ; or that liberty cannot be constituted a right, if its 

 historical origin cannot be proved. It is evident, from the least dis- 

 puted facts in history — such, for instance, as the vast power which 

 the landholders possessed over their servants, bondsmen, and the few 

 inhabitants of towns, the total absence of a middle class in society, the 

 little respect that was paid to existing laws, and, finally, the incessant 

 commotions and agitations which divided and distracted the provinces 

 "—it is evident, we say, when all the circumstances are distinctly con- 

 sidered, that the Anglo-Saxon constitution was either originally of an 

 oligarchical character, or had at least, in the course of time, degene- 

 rated into one. 



The Anglo-Saxon liberty, if any such ever existed, might have 



