This seems to be the opinion of her wisest historians, and it is an opinion fully justified by events. Thus the real and practical constitution of England was unquestionably altered, although the theoretical constitution remained unchanged, through all that period of time involving the downfall of Charles, the Commonwealth of Cromwell, and the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty. No radical alteration of the constitution, by affixing metes and bounds to the domain of sovereignty, can be said to have occurred until the passage of the Act of Settlement placing William and Mary upon the throne. Then, and then only, were the boundaries of a constitutional sovereignty fixed by an impassable Rubicon.

That day witnessed the triumph of the permanent will of the people, expressed in its new constitution, over the capricious and despotic will of the sovereign heretofore speaking as the autocrat of the realm. It was the triumph of English Puritanism over a State Church which had used the secular arm of the law to enforce the doctrine of the divine right in kings and of passive obedience in subjects. The nation had fought for it, had suffered for it, had waited for it through civil war, domestic oppression, and religious persecution, during the long centuries which covered the reigns of the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts. At last it came, bringing with it a new order of the centuries and kindling that torch of Republican independence which has since been carried to the uttermost parts of the earth.

The Revolution of 1688, which made Parliament supreme over all by giving it the character of a convention of the people, established constitutional liberty forever among the English-speaking races. It completed the edifice of free government by compelling recognition of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Thence

forth no estate of the realm felt itself above the reach of the popular will. The king on his throne and the peer in the House of Lords saw the handwriting on the wall which announced the downfall of governments founded upon caste.

It was from this new order of things in the mother country that the American colonists drew their largest inspiration and hopes of free representative government. By removing to an unsettled and almost uninhabited country and carrying their charters with them, they placed themselves beyond the reach of judicial supervision at the hands of the home government, whose authority in this particular they ever afterwards disputed. Possessing also the advantage of local independence, and unfettered by the presence and oppression of a church establishment interwoven with the civil authority, there was nothing to complicate the enterprise of a government by the people for the people. The events of the succeeding century, in their variegated aspects of peace and war, wrought out as a stupendous conclusion a union of sovereign States based upon a constitution ratified by the entire people. Transcending in this respect anything similar ever before done in Greece, Rome, Holland, or England, the thirteen colonies. thence became, like the banyan tree, a parent trunk from which fresh shoots have been constantly springing to form new stocks.

The legislation which, beginning with the Virginia and Plymouth colony laws, now emanates from the popular assemblies of so many sovereign States, is a monument to the wisdom of the fathers who laid the foundations of this organic unity and harmonious development in the Constitution of the United States. No statute however important, or however insignificant, but is bound to it by an invisible cord of loyalty and subor

dination. No judicial decision from whatever court it may emanate, which touches the relations of the citizen to the State, but is compelled to find its reason and support in this great charter of our liberties It is therefore the source and the origin of all law-making powers the compass and the guide of forensic judgments-and the shield and protection of personal liberty under every law made in the land.

Although political institutions are the work of the human will, they have not sprung spontaneously into existence. Man being a social animal has always lived in some form of society, and government merely expresses the necessity of regulating human actions by the agency of rules based upon the varying requirements of human wants. It is needless to say that no government can be so perfectly constructed as never to need any changes in its administrative law. None, consequently, can endure without making alterations in its political codes. The system which suited its youth will not apply equally well to its mature age. Population, commerce, and the industrial arts are constantly changing and enlarging their relations to the State; and the new rights to which they give birth, or the old rights which they disturb, require fresh re-adjustments of the municipal law. All positive law is thus seen to be merely tentative with respect to the end for which it supplies the means. Hence there is a constant necessity for reviewing the past in legislation, before venturing upon an experiment which may unsettle results that experience has shown to be in the direction of the greatest good to the greatest number. This leads to a consideration at the outset of the sources of Representative government in their philosophical aspects, for it is here that we find the key to every form of democratic polity, however varied in institutional expression.

Whenever we examine the foundations of government in any country, we invariably find them resting upon either the traditions of dogma, or the doctrine of convention. In the case of dogma, sovereignty is supposed to rest upon a divine right to exercise power as a special franchise, bestowed upon either a person, a family, or tribe, and which creates at once a regal status in them and their descendants with, necessarily, an inferior status in those who are governed.1 The title of sovereign, and the servile designation of subject, spring very logically out of such a relation, and the coronation oil of the ceremonial law constitutes the warrant of divine authority to rule.

Whether this titular right to govern was originally disclosed by an act of tribal conquest, or of personal prowess, matters little in the history of absolute monarchy when hereditary. The fact being accepted by any nation as a right of sovereignty in its ruler, the dogma of his title becomes thenceforth fixed and immutable.

The growth of this idea of kingship among the Englishspeaking races can readily be traced from the archaïc days of the Saxon heptarchy, when kings were content to be known simply as a chieftain and first man among their people, down to the time when the plural pronoun "we" began to appear in royal charters, and the monarch assumed the territorial title of King of England, instead of the older title of King of the English. The former title implied sovereign ownership of the entire country, the latter only leadership of its inhabitants. Along with this transition in titles arose the idea that crowns

1 For the most exhaustive exposition of the patriarchal theory of government, consult the "Patriarcha" of Sir Robert Filmer, written in the reign of Charles 1st, and Bishop Overall's Convocation Book, written in the reign of James 1st. 2 Hallam's Lit. of Europe, 358.

2 1 Freeman's Norman Conquest, 82; Maine's Early Hist. of Inst. 73.

were personal property hereditary in certain families, and therefore, that election by the people was superfluous. The personal right to a crown being thus conceded, the reigning monarch, whoever he might be, was supposed to hold his title by a transmitted sovereignty which was indisputable.

Under the Tudors and Stuarts the word King became a word of conjuration. The idea which it conveyed was that of a being hedged about by a sacred mystery of authority placing him above the law. His person might be human, but his royal investiture surrounded him with a nimbus of divinity which shielded him from the errors common to our race. The established church paid him the homage of passive obedience as its temporal head-the law made him a corporation sole, and pointed to him as the fountain of honor-of justice-of equity, and in his corporate capacity declared him to be infallible, dispunishable, immortal. The King can do no wrong; the King cannot be sued; prescription runneth not against the King; the King never dies; such are the maxims with which English jurisprudence buttressed the throne. It was only necessary to find a royal ancestor, in order to justify the right to some crown in any of his lineal descendants. History is full of examples of this kind in the claims to dynastic successions made by descendants of reigning families in Europe, on the appearance of any vacant throne. Every royal marriage, in fact, from time immemorial, has been but another effort to perpetuate in a peaceable way, a title to royalty of a questionable character. It is probable that the right of any dynasty in Europe at this day to its particular throne when closely scrutinized, will, with few exceptions, be found to rest either upon direct

See this doctrine examined and exploded as to the U. S. Government, or any of its officers, in Langford v. U. S., 101 U. S. 341.