In spite of the break at the Norman Conquest, the continuity of the old English law, which had never been abandoned, was established when Henry I, the son of the Conqueror, solemnly reaffirmed the laws of Edward the Confessor (that is, the Anglo-Saxon laws existing under that reign). Their substance was affirmed anew in the Magna Carta of King John.

"The English Common Law may be described as a preeminently national system. Based on Saxon constitutions, molded by Norman lawyers, and jealous of foreign systems, it is, as Bacon says, as mixed as the English language and as truly national. And, like the language, it has been taken into other English-speaking countries, and is the father of the law in the United States."

-"Encyclopedia Britannica," vol. vi, p. 778. The Jus civile, the Civil Law of Rome, was of necessity pervaded by the imperialistic conception of the entire Roman government. It may be said in very general terms that the ideal of the Roman law was repression, while that of the English law was protection. We see the care for the rights of the individual in the great principles and maxims of English law: that no man may be required to give evidence which would incriminate himself; that no man may be put in jeopardy twice for the same offense; in the maxim that "it is better that ten guilty men escape than that one innocent man should be punished"; in the rights of habeas corpus and of trial by jury. Common Law has faults enough, and much of the study of English jurists

has been to remedy those faults. Still, as a system, it aims to safeguard the rights of the citizen, so that where it prevails the citizen appeals to the law as once the Roman citizens would "appeal unto Cæsar."

They had built up an individualistic civilization, of which their laws and their national polity were but the concrete expression. Even the Roman historian Tacitus remarks the personal independence of their Germanic ancestors in their old home, how they dwelt alone, each in his own little dwelling. Not only was each habitation independent in the early Anglo-Saxon days, but each settlement had the same guarded independence. Around every village was a space of common land which none might appropriate, and any stranger crossing this ground must blow a horn to announce his approach, as otherwise he might be taken for an enemy and killed by the first one meeting him. Still this love of separate homes is deep in the hearts of the English and of all their descendants. Even in closely settled towns and villages they love the little yards enclosed by fence or hedge, marking each plot of ground as "private property" of those who dwell there. Employers of labor prefer in many callings newly arrived foreigners to native Americans because "Americans do not like to work in gangs." We find the strong tendency to individualism in the love of home, which is so strong a passion among all descendants of the English race-not merely love

of native land but of the very abode around which cluster the dearest memories of childhood and the love of maturer life. We find it in the English maxim that "every man's house is his castle"; in the opposition to the right of search, except as closely and narrowly limited by specific law. By this Pitt symbolizes the independence of the individual under the laws of England:

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the power of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England can not enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of that ruined tenement."

We see the same quality manifested in the freedom of speech and of the press that prevails in England and her colonies and in the United States to an extent known nowhere else on earth.

The individualist civilization is alone immortal, because its life is supplied by countless new centers of force, ever varying and ever renewed. It is only by crushing individual initiative that imperialism ever becomes, or can become, great, and by that victory it dries up the very sources of supply needed to sustain its own power. The imperialist civilization is doomed to inevitable decay, because all its myriad lives are but suckers at the base of one mighty stem, repressed and dwarfed by the overshadowing greatness of the one. The vitality of a family, of a school, a university, a business or a

nation will be ruined by too much control and discipline. Every aristocracy declines except as it is reinvigorated with new blood by members who "marry below their station." Every dynasty decays. Every despotism dies of dry-rot. A great nation can continue great only by the new and infinitely varying vigor of multitudinous lives in free and unrepressed activity and expansion.

To have built such a civilization and won for it a place of honor and power among the nations is an achievement well worth the toil, struggles and battles of six hundred years, and justified by the triumphs of well-nigh a thousand years since it first became an accomplished fact upon earth.

This wonderful people had created a new language of distinct individuality and singular endurance. Of the Teutonic family, kindred to the Gothic, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and German, yet like no one of these, and wholly unlike the Romance languages, whose empire began just south of the narrow Channel and extended through France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to the Mediterranean, the Anglo-Saxon stood distinct from all. From the Celtic, shut in with it in the North and West of the same island, it was separated by a racial antipathy which has been so persistent that though Celtic influences have made their way into English literature, Celtic words have never formed any large part either of the Anglo-Saxon or of the English language. Though the English language was later,

under the stress of the Norman Conquest, to adopt numerous elements from the French and the ancient classic tongues, yet in its early independence it neither asked nor welcomed aid from any other speech except where, as through the church, some few words were accepted for which, in its own vocabulary, there were no equivalents. Through all changes and vicissitudes, and in its widest extension, the Anglo-Saxon has held, and still holds, its original type, and is to-day the fundamental and dominant element of English speech. It seems to be an expression of the life of the race that produced it, and as indestructible as that race.

The Anglo-Saxon language was one of remarkable simplicity. This is due in part to the shortness of its words, which are prevailingly monosyllabic or dissyllabic. In modern English this is often said to be due to the fact that the longer Anglo-Saxon words fell into disuse after the Norman Conquest. But this explanation, while to a certain extent true, is still inadequate. One need only look at the old Anglo-Saxon poems, as of Beowulf or Layamon, and, without knowing the Anglo-Saxon language, his eye will tell him, as it ranges down page after page, that most of those words are of one or two syllables each. Any longer word is quite sure to be a proper name or some inflected form of a short word increased by an ending. The tendency to short, strong words was deep in the life of the people. The Anglo-Saxons were not a speculative,