Teutonic settlements substantial reproductions of the older tribal life. heathenism the invaders passed, without intermediate probation, from their seats in the far north to their island home, bearing with them in their blood and bone the primeval polity of the fatherland. The details of the process by which the old Teutonic polity was transferred to Britain are not recorded, but from the state of things which is found to exist when authentic history begins the conclusion is irresistible that the Teutonic settlements in Britain were a substantial in Britain reproduction of the older state of things described in the Germania. The chain of evidence upon which this conclusion rests, "no criticism is strong enough or sharp enough to sever." The village community which appears in Germany as the mark, reappears as the tun or township in Britain, where it becomes the "unit of the constitutional machinery."2 The town The township, like the mark, is at once a cultivating and a ship. political community, and in its qualified members resides the power to order their own village and agricultural life. This power is vested in the village assembly or tun-moot in which the townsmen regulate the internal affairs of the township by the making of by-laws, a term which is said to mean laws enacted by a "by," as the township was called in the northern shires. The tun-moot elected its own officers, and also provided for the representation of its interests in the courts of the hundred and the shire, where the gerefa and four discreet men appeared for the township. In this arrangement appears the earliest form of the representative principle. "In these four discreet men sent to speak for their township in the old county assembly, we have the germ of institutions that have ripened into the House of Commons and into the legislatures of modern kingdoms and republics. In the system of representation thus inaugurated lay the future possibility of such gigantic political aggregates as the United States of America."3 Out of a union of townships arose the hundred, out of a union. of hundreds arose the primitive rice or kingdom, — the civitas of Cæsar and Tacitus. But before the historic period begins these primitive states in which the settlers originally grouped themselves have ceased to exist as independent com Earliest form of the representa tive princi ple. The primitive king doms. 1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 71. 8 John Fiske, American Political Ideas, p. 71. 4 Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 1' tarchic idated king munities, they have become bound up in seven or eight larger aggregates generally known as the heptarchic king- The hepdoms. These larger aggregates were finally fused into a kingdoms. single consolidated kingdom, which is the ultimate outcome of the process of aggregation in which the local, self-governing communities descend in status without the loss of their autonomy. The consolidated kingdom represents an aggre- The consolgation of shires; the shire an aggregation of hundreds; the dom hundred an aggregation of townships. Upon the substructure thus made up of local, self-governing communities the English political system has ever depended for its permanency, its elasticity, its enduring power. In every one of these communities the idea of local self-government was intensely developed, and in their very structure were imbedded, from the beginning, the germs of the representative system. And from the tendency conscious or unconscious upon the part of Englishmen to reproduce these self-governing communities in other lands has resulted the ascendancy and power of the English nation as a colonizing nation. The entire fabric of the new society-out of whose New soci political elements arose in Britain the constitution of the ety purely consolidated kingdom-was purely Teutonic. Its language was made up of a set of dialects of the Low German; the only religion which it possessed was the religion of Woden; its only conception of government and law was a purely Teutonic conception. The witness of language, of religion, and of law all point to the one irresistible conclusion that, within the limits which they made their own, the conquerors of Britain "created a Germany outside of Germany."1 The old Teutonic constitution was thus replanted in its purity in the free and unincumbered soil of an island world, where it has. been able to work out its historic development in a state of comparative isolation. So deeply were its foundations laid in its island home that it has been able to survive, and to preserve its identity, through all the vicissitudes of time and of change through which it has passed. In the political history of the world the Teutonic constitution, which thus matured on British soil, occupies the foremost place for two Teutonic conquest and settlement of Britain, see ch. iii. bk. i. 1 Taine, Hist. of Eng. Literature, vol. i. p. 50. Upon the subject of the tion. - reasons. In the first place, it has had the most continuous and unbroken development; in the second place, out of that unbroken development has been evolved the most important political principle with which the world has so far become acquainted — the principle of representative government. Represen- Of this principle, which has been justly called a Teutonic tative principle a Teu- invention, the ancient world knew practically nothing.1 The tonic inven- political systems of all the Teutonic nations, as they appear to us when written history begins, contained germs of the representative principle, germs which were imbedded in the organization of their local, self-governing communities. And in every one of the modern European states that have arisen out of the settlements made by the Teutonic nations on Roman soil a serious attempt has been at some time made in the direction of representative government. But the remarkable fact is that in every Continental state in which such an attempt was made, it ended at last in failure and disappointment. By the sixteenth century every effort in the direction tive govern- of representative government upon the Continent of Europe out every had come to an end. In England only among the Teutonic in England. nations did the representative system survive; in England Representa ment dies where but only has the representative principle been able to maintain a continuous existence. In this way the English nation has been able to hand down the representative principle from the barbarian epoch to modern times; in this way England has become the "mother of parliaments"-the teacher of the science of representative government to all the world. Since the date of the French Revolution nearly all the states of continental Europe have organized national assemblies after the model of the English Parliament in a spirit of conscious imitation.3 1 "It is the great political invention of Teutonic Europe, the one form of political life to which neither Thucydides, Aristotle, nor Polybios ever saw more than the faintest approach."- Freeman, Hist. Fed. Govt., vol. i. p. 67. 2 "In the fourth period, on the Continent, all efforts towards a representative system have failed or almost entirely disappeared; pure monarchy prevails. England alone decidedly obtains a constitutional government. This epoch lasts from the sixteenth See 8 "The British political model was followed by France, by Spain and Portugal, and by Holland and Belgium, combined in the Kingdom of the Netherlands; and, after a long interval, by Germany, Italy, and Austria.” — Maine, Popular Govt., p. 13. 5. In our own land the case is far otherwise. The repre- Growth of the English sentative systems which sprang up as a part of the constitu- colonies in tional machinery of the several provincial states founded by America. English settlers upon American soil were in no proper sense the result of imitation. Like the states themselves of which they were a part, they were the predestined product of a natural process of reproduction. The constitutional history of these provincial states does not begin with the landing of the English in America in the seventeenth century, but with the landing of the English in Britain in the fifth.2 The English emigrants who founded upon the eastern coast of what is now the United States group of colonial commonwealths brought with them in their blood and bone, and in a matured form, that peculiar system of political organization which had been slowly developing in the mother country for centuries. They brought with them ready made the language, the law, the institutions of the old land to be modified and adapted to the changed conditions of the new. The settlements made by the English colonists in America in the seventeenth century were in all material particulars substantial reproductions of the English settlements made in Britain in the fifth. In both instances the settlers crossed the sea in ships in small companies, and in both lands they grouped themselves together in distinct and practically independent self-governing communities.3 phy of and its ef The tide of Aryan migration, from which has been peopled Physiogra both the Old World and the New, has traversed no land in North its whole westward course more capable of supplying all of America, the varied wants of a great and growing nationality than that fects upon in which the English settlers in America made their homes. tion. The vast expanse of territory now embraced within the limits of the United States offered to the European emigrant not only nearly every variety of soil and climate to which he had 1 "The local assemblies in which the colonists were represented 'were not formally instituted, but grew up by themselves, because it was in the nature of Englishmen to assemble.' Maine, Pop. Govt., p. 223. Hutchinson says, "This year (1619) a House of Burgesses broke out in Virginia." See Seeley, The Expansion of Eng., p. 67. 2 Freeman, The English People in its Three Homes, p. 360. 8" Wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has gone, wherever they have carried their language and laws, these communities, each with a local administration of its own selection, have gone with them." Mr. Justice Brown, in The People v. Draper, 15 N. V. pp. 532, 562. immigra been accustomed in the Old World, but it also offered him easy access to its heart through a system of mighty waterways navigable through nearly their entire course. The fact that most of the navigable rivers of America flow eastward made the new land easily accessible from the Atlantic to those who had once passed the difficulties and perils of its navigation westward. In addition to such inducements as these America also offered to the European emigrant a new and cheap source of bread with which to sustain the beginStruggle for nings of life in the wilderness.1 Early in the sixteenth possession between century a spirited competition began between England, England, France, and Spain for the possession of that part of North France, and Spain. America which is bounded on the north by the great lakes and the St. Lawrence, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the west by the Mississippi, and on the east by the Atlantic. The results of the first period of struggle for the possession of the heart of the New World may be summed up in the assertion that while Spain succeeded in securing a footing upon its southern, and France upon its northern border, every attempt at settlement made by Englishmen in America during the sixteenth century ended before its close in failure and disappointment. The only circumstance from which England could draw any consolation whatever was embodied in the fact that while her rivals had secured a precarious hold upon Canada and Florida, their mutual hostilities and contentions2 had prevented either from entering into possession of the vast and priceless central district in which the English settlements of the seventeenth century were destined to be established. During that period it was that the permanent English settlements in America were made which were finally incorporated in the thirteen colonies that grew into the Federal Republic of the United States. European nations agree that discovery gives title. In order to regulate the competition for the possession of the New World, and to avoid conflicting settlements, and consequent war with each other, the European nations agreed "to establish a principle which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted, 1 As to the "Effects of the physiography of North America on men of European origin," see Narrative and Critical Hist. of Am., vol. iv. pp. x.-xxx. 2 See Doyle, English Colonies in Am., Virginia, etc., p. 100. |