Popular Law-making | Page 4

people.
And there is another invention--if we can call it one--to my mind of far greater importance, which I should urge was also peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people; that is, the invention or the idea of personal liberty; which is understood, and always has been understood, by Anglo-Saxons in a sense in which it never existed before, so far as I know, in any people in the history of the world. It is that notion of personal liberty which was the cause of representative government, not representative government that was the cause of personal liberty. In other words, the people did not get up a parliament for the sake of having that parliament enact laws securing personal liberty. It was the result of a condition of personal liberty which prevailed among them and in their laws that resulted in representative government, and in the institution of a legislature, making, as we now would say, the laws; though a thousand years ago they never said that a legislature made laws, they only said that it told what the laws were. This is another very important distinction. The "law" of the free Anglo-Saxon people was regarded as a thing existing by itself, like the sunlight, or at least as existing like a universally accepted custom observed by every one. It was five hundred years before the notion crept into the minds, even of the members of the British Parliaments, that they could make a new law. What they supposed they did, and what they were understood by the people to do, was merely to declare the law, as it was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always being--and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are, the more they have that notion--that their free laws and customs were something which came from the beginning of the world, which they always held, which were immutable, no more to be changed than the forces of nature; and that no parliament, under the free Anglo-Saxon government, or later under the Norman kings, who tried to make them unfree, no king, could ever make a law, but could only declare what the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is jus dare, and jus dicere. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the Parliament never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I said, not only what it was then, but what it had been, as they supposed, for thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make new laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament. How did it arise? The English Parliament,[1] as you doubtless know, was the successor, or grew out of the old Witenagemot, the old Saxon Great Council, and that Great Council originally--and I am now talking of centuries before the Conquest--the Witenagemot, included in theory all the free inhabitants of the realm, just as a modern town meeting does. Mind you, they were then tribes, living in "Hundreds." They were not nations, not even states and counties, and in early times it probably was possible to have a popular assembly which should include at least all the warriors, all the fighting men, and consequently all the men whose votes counted. No man who could not fight could share in the government--an historical fact which our suffragists tend to ignore when they talk of "rights." The Witenagemot, undoubtedly, was originally a universal assembly of the tribe in question. But as the tribes got amalgamated, were associated together, or at least localized instead of wandering about, and particularly when they got localized in England--where before they had been but a roaming people on account of their struggles with the Britons--the necessity of greater organization probably became obvious to them at once, and the Witenagemot readily assumed a somewhat more formal form; and that resulted in representation. For we are talking of early England; that is, of the eastern half of what is now England, the Saxon part; obviously you couldn't put all the members even of East Anglia in one hall or in one field to discuss laws, so they invented representation. All the authorities appear to be agreed that there is no prototype for what seems to us such a very simple thing as representation, representative government, among the Greeks or the Romans, or any of the older civilizations of which we have knowledge. It is very surprising that it is so, and I am always expecting that some one will discover, either in the Achaian League or somewhere, that it is not so, that there is a prototype; but there doesn't seem to be any regular system of representative government until you get to Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that was the second stage of the Witenagemot, and then