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antecedent tendencies and conditions, in addition to merely local and contemporaneous circumstances. When a given institution exists in analogous forms among several portions of the same race, and when it is traceable in essence to a common source in racial experience, the assumption of entire originality for the institution, in any one of the scattered localities where it may be found, is unscientific and historically unsound. Circumstances, which may have led to its revived establishment, should never be confused with the institution itself; for its own identity of traits may be obvious, though the occasion of revival may have been in no two cases the same. While the institutions of the American colonies arose in many instances as if by accident, the fact that the colonies generally agreed in essentials with each other and with the parent nation cannot, of course, be scientifically explained as accidental or as the result of invention.

There is a distinctive tone to American institutions; and a pardonable patriotic pride very naturally tempts Americans to dwell upon whatever differentiates their country from others. But there is no necessary disparagement of this distinctiveness in the fact that what is called American political originality often rests upon adaptation; for civil progress always and everywhere implies an element of novelty, based upon volition as a modifying and creative influence, and can never be simply automatic. Some institutions of the United States are the result of invention. Others, which Americans

have inherited and have changed to suit themselves, until an assertion of originality seems justifiable, were not changed for the first time here, but underwent repeated alteration before reaching American soil. Originality in such a sense is part of the whole history of AngloTeutonic institutions. Yet it is a characteristic of the race both in England and America that it has never really broken with the past. Whatever of novelty may appear from time to time, there is ever under all the great and steady force of historic continuity.

The present volume, in treating of this element of continuity as affecting the Constitution of the United States, traces the beginnings of things, scattered as they are through many centuries. Institutions thus found are followed from their origins through successive modifications and changes in the Old World and in the colonies. The investigation includes the constitutional action of the newly formed States, so far as that was transitional or bore relation to the national Constitution. A large number of illustrative citations from political and legal writers are scattered through the pages, and chief documents of the constitution-making period are accorded, in whole or in part, a place in the appendix, with the object of aiding studious readers to a comprehensive view of the subject.

There exists in some quarters an erroneous impression that this work was undertaken to controvert the assertion of Dutch origins as made in Mr. Douglas Campbell's current book, the Puritan in Holland, England, and America. In point of fact, the present text was completed before

Mr. Campbell's book appeared. The author has no disagreement with the claim that representatives of various races have exercised a degree of influence on the American nation at large; but he has been obliged to notice some of Mr. Campbell's untenable positions as to the Constitution, in footnotes added on the eve of publication. The aim of the work being independent historical investigation, and not controversial theory, all similar side discussions have been relegated to notes.

Our institutions are essentially Teutonic, and the channels through which the ancient influences have made themselves felt in the Constitution, are conceded to be predominantly colonial and English. The historian of institutions thus held in common by the mother country and our own, can never treat Great Britain as he might properly treat a land of alien peoples. That old land which is the home of our language, and which holds the dust of most of our forefathers, can never be wholly foreign soil. And this is well, And this is well, for surely mankind is the better for whatever binds together these two great

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kindred nations in the love of liberty.

PHILADELPHIA, 1894.

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