Edward Freeman - The Growth of the English Constitution

I have referred more than once to the picture of our race in its earliest recorded times, as set before us by the greatest of Roman historians in the Germany of Tacitus. Let me now set before you some special points of his description in his own words as well as I am able to clothe them in an English dress 23.

“They choose their Kings on account of their nobility, their leaders on account of their valour. Nor have the Kings an unbounded or arbitrary power, and the leaders rule rather by their example than by the right of command; if they are ready, if they are foreward, if they are foremost in leading the van, they hold the first place in honour… On smaller matters the chiefs debate, on greater matters all men; but so that those things whose final decision rests with the whole people are first handled by the chiefs… The multitude sits armed in such order as it thinks good; silence is proclaimed by the priests, who have also the right of enforcing it. Presently the King or chief, according to the age of each, according to his birth, according to his glory in war or his eloquence, is listened to, speaking rather by the influence of persuasion than by the power of commanding. If their opinions give offence, they are thrust aside with a shout; if they are approved, the hearers clash their spears. It is held to be the most honourable kind of applause to use their weapons to signify approval. It is lawful also in the assembly to bring matters for trial and to bring charges of capital crimes… In the same assembly chiefs are chosen to administer justice through the districts and villages. Each chief in so doing has a hundred companions of the commons assigned to him, as at once his counsellors and his authority. Moreover they do no matter of business, public or private, except in arms.”

Here we have a picture of a free commonwealth of warriors, in which each freeman has his place in the state, where the vote of the general Assembly is the final authority on all matters, but where both hereditary descent and elective office are held in high honour. We see also in a marked way the influence of personal character and of the power of speech; we see the existence of local divisions, local assemblies, local magistrates; in a word, we see in this picture of our forefathers in their old land, seventeen hundred years ago, the germs of all the institutions which have grown up step by step among ourselves in the course of ages. And a Swiss of the democratic Cantons would see in it, not merely the germs of his constitution, but the living picture of the thing itself.

This immemorial Teutonic constitution was thus the constitution of our forefathers in their old land of Northern Germany, before they made their way into the Isle of Britain. And that constitution, in all its essential points, they brought with them into their new homes, and there, transplanted to a new soil, it grew and flourished, and brought forth fruit richer and more lasting than it brought forth in the land of its earlier birth. On the Teutonic mainland, the old Teutonic freedom, with its free assemblies, national and local, gradually died out before the encroachments of a brood of petty princes 24. In the Teutonic island it has changed its form from age to age; it has lived through many storms and it has withstood the attacks of many enemies, but it has never utterly died out. The continued national life of the people, notwithstanding foreign conquests and internal revolutions, has remained unbroken for fourteen hundred years. At no moment has the tie between the present and the past been wholly rent asunder; at no moment have Englishmen sat down to put together a wholly new constitution in obedience to some dazzling theory. Each step in our growth has been the natural consequence of some earlier step; each change in our law and constitution has been, not the bringing in of anything wholly new, but the developement and improvement of something that was already old. Our progress has in some ages been faster, in others slower; at some moments we have seemed to stand still, or even to go back; but the great march of political developement has never wholly stopped; it has never been permanently checked since the day when the coming of the Teutonic conquerors first began to change Britain into England. New and foreign elements have from time to time thrust themselves into our law; but the same spirit which could develope and improve whatever was old and native has commonly found means sooner or later to cast forth again whatever was new and foreign. The lover of freedom, the lover of progress, the man who has eyes keen enough to discover real identity under a garb of outward unlikeness, need never shrink from tracing up the political institutions of England to their earliest shape. The fourteen hundred years of English history are the possession of those who would ever advance, not the possession of those who would stand still or go backwards. The wisdom of our forefathers was ever shown, not in a dull and senseless clinging to things as they were at any given moment, but in that spirit, the spirit alike of the true reformer and the true conservative, which keeps the whole fabric standing, by repairing and improving from time to time whatever parts of it stand in need of repair or improvement. Let ancient customs prevail 25; let us ever stand fast in the old paths. But the old paths have in England ever been the paths of progress; the ancient custom has ever been to shrink from mere change for the sake of change, but fearlessly to change whenever change was really needed. And many of the best changes of later times, many of the most wholesome improvements in our Law and Constitution, have been only the casting aside of innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times. They have been the calling up again, in an altered garb, of principles as old as the days when we get our first sight of our forefathers in their German forests. Changed as it is in all outward form and circumstance, the England in which we live, has, in its true life and spirit, far more in common with the England of the earliest times than it has with the England of days far nearer to our own. In many a wholesome act of modern legislation, we have gone back, wittingly or unwittingly, to the earliest principles of our race. We have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things; we have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation.

I have said that the primæval Teutonic constitution was brought with them by our Teutonic forefathers when they came as conquerors into the Isle of Britain. I will not again go into the details of the English Conquest, the settlement which gave us a new home in a new land, nor into all the questions and controversies to which the details of the English Conquest have given rise. I have spoken of them over and over again with my voice and with my pen, and I hope I may now take for granted what I have fully argued out elsewhere 26. I hope that I may be allowed to assume the plain facts of the case, without going through the details of every point. I will assume then – for it is that to which the question really comes – that England is England and that Englishmen are Englishmen. I will assume that we are not Romans or Welshmen, but that we are the descendants of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who came hither in the fifth and sixth centuries, of the Danes and Northmen who came hither in the ninth. I will assume that we are a people, not indeed of unmixed Teutonic blood – for no people in the world is of absolutely unmixed blood – but a people whose blood is not more mixed than that of any other nation; that Englishmen are as truly Englishmen as Britons are Britons or as High-Germans are High-Germans. I will assume that what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being; that whatever else we may have in us, whatever we have drawn from those whom we conquered or from those who conquered us, is no coordinate element, but a mere infusion into our Teutonic essence; in a word I will assume that Englishmen are Englishmen, that we are ourselves and not some other people. I assume all this; if any man disputes it, if any man chooses not to be an Englishman but to be a Welshman or a Roman, I cannot argue with him now; I can only ask him to turn to the arguments which I have urged on all those points in other times and places. I assume that, as we have had one national name, one national speech, from the beginning, we may be fairly held to have an unbroken national being. And when we find a Teutonic-speaking people in Britain living under the same political and social forms as the Teutonic-speaking people of the mainland, it is surely no very rash or far-fetched inference that the tongue and the laws which they have in common are a common possession drawn from a common source; that the island colony in short came itself, and brought its laws and language with it, from the elder mother-land beyond the sea.