6 JOHN GEORGE BOURINOT 



rights, and the causes that led English statesmen at last to change their policy towards 

 these dependencies of the Empire, and to grant the large measure of self-government we 

 now enjoy, are more or less of an historical as well as political nature, and clearly enter 

 into the domain of Political Science. Indeed, history and the political sciences are so 

 closely associated that so high an authority as the late eminent Prof. Francis Lieber, 

 of Columbia College, in the city of New York, made these studies an independent and 

 homogeneous department in that excellent institution. On this point Prof. Herbert 

 Adams, of Johns Hopkins University, has said with much force : " There is a valuable 

 and suggestive idea in Lieber's first combination of history and politics, which ought to 

 influence all American colleges and universities in the proper coordination of these 

 studies. If, for economic or other reasons, there must be a grouping of various subjects 

 under one administrative head, history ought rather to be yoked with political science 

 than with language, literature or philosophy. The nature of History and Political Science 

 determines their intimate relation, if not their necessary coordination. History is past 

 politics and politics is present history. History is, primarily, the experience of man in organ- 

 ized societies or so-called states. Political Science is the application of this historical 

 experience to the existing problems of an ever progressive society. History and politics 

 are as inseparable as past and present. This view is justified by the best historical and 

 political opinion of our time — Kanke, Droysen, Bluntschli, Knies, Roscher, Nitzsch, 

 Freeman, Seeley, and by the practical experience of the best American colleges and 

 universities." ' 



Among the studies that naturally enter into the domain of Political Science we may 

 mention the study of general and historical jurisprudence, which necessarily o^jens up a 

 large field in a country like this, where one province, inhabited by a million and a quar- 

 ter of people, has a system of law drawn from the civil law of France, which again rests 

 on the principles of that famous Roman law which has entered into the institutions of so 

 many nations of Europe, and more or less affected the civil conditions of nations who 

 have exerted, and continue to exert, such important influences on the destinies of the 

 world. 



It is generally admitted that the common law of England itself exhibits to the care- 

 ful inquirer traces of the influences of Roman law, and that the principles that govern 

 equity jurisprudence have been largely drawn from the same remarkable source. But in 

 studying that great system of common law, which is the basis of the jurisprudence of all 

 the English-speaking communities of the Dominion, the student of Political Science will 

 naturally take a philosophic survey of English history in order to obtain an accurate 

 insight into the genius of those principles, usages, and laws of action which have from 

 all times been applied to the government and the security of persons and property in Eng- 

 land. The political and civil liberty which we now enjoy is the natural heritage of 

 English communities throughout the world, and its main principles can be traced to the 

 maxims of the common law. It illustrates the sturdy, independent spirit of the English 

 race, and its determination to resist all the efforts of mouarchs, with the assistance of 

 servile statesmen, to establish an arbitrary power in the realm. The great principles on 

 which our parliamentary government rests had their origin in maxims in vogue in the 



' Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, by H. B. Adams, Ph. D., p. 67. 



