568 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 



ries, a complete supremacy in matters of war, justice, police, finance, 

 and its relations with the Church." l The House of Lords is trans- 

 forming itself, and the House of Commons has become the expres- 

 sion of the conscience of the nation, as in a most complete demo- 

 cracy; the control of finance is perfected, the action of parliament 

 is ever farther extending itself to the Church, to the school, to 

 economical reforms, increasing the state's protection in the interest 

 of the weak; giving to all social legislation a development which 

 overcomes the most audacious aspirations of the leges agrariae, and 

 anticipates sometimes the same requests of socialism, never neglect- 

 ing to appeal to all individual energies. The conferring of offices as 

 well as all that which concerns the civil service is transformed, 

 keeping in account the examples of the Continent; the self-govern- 

 ment followed the increasing interventions in sanitary police, in the 

 beneficence, in the administration itself with numerous boards, dis- 

 posing of enormous powers. The ancient squire finds himself at the 

 mercy of the rural majority, and the allotments, the surveyance, and 

 the inspections of the unhealthy dwellings, the direction of charities, 

 the roads, are offering ground for new struggles, raising new pro- 

 blems, determining consequences hardly foreseen in the distribution 

 of feudatory ownerships, in the power of the ancient leading classes, 

 and in all social arrangements. 



Therefore, who will understand the English constitution with 

 Montesquieu, or also with Macaulay and Hallam, and even with 

 Bagehot, would prove the same deceits, like your students if they 

 would continue to follow the lessons which Francis Lieber dictated 

 in the year 1853 on civil liberty and self-government for South Caro- 

 lina and perfected in 1859 from the chair of Columbia College. When 

 we think of the modifications to which even this ideal of liberty was 

 subjected, we are obliged to recognize that you have acted wisely 

 without giving any definition of liberty in the federal constitution 

 and causing it to enlighten the world like a supreme watch-tower 

 in the port of New York. Of course no one will deny that what is 

 beautiful, great, and useful in the world is due to liberty; it is the 

 reign of the right, but there is no right without liberty. It is the con- 

 quest of centuries, during which the weak was subjected to the strong, 

 the debtor to the creditor, the laborer of the land to his feudal lord, 

 the infidel to the torture of the Inquisition, a whole human herd 

 to a few audacious and lawless men. Liberty has changed the 

 slave treated like things, the prisoner sacred to the inhuman heca- 

 tombs, the vast populations voted to the sacred springs, the slaves 

 bent on the feudal soil, the subjects watched by a suspicious police 

 into citizen legislators of modern democracies. 



1 Englische Venvallungsrechl der Gegcnwart, Berlin, 1882, 1st ed.; Englische 

 Communalursprung, Berlin, 1883, 1st ed.; Geschichte der Englische Parliament, 

 Berlin, 1890. 



