"right of revolution" which they then exercised had been a constitutional right of Englishmen, recognized as such since the day the barons wrested Magna Carta from the unwilling hands of King John "in the meadow which is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines." We see in our own constitutions, both State and Federal, specific declarations of those rights. Hence, no one can hope to have a thorough understanding of our own structure of government and of the great principles which animate it, without a study of the growth of the English system. We cannot fail, then, to find profit in the study of the development of the underlying principles of English government, not merely because of the interest we naturally feel in what, up to a certain point, is our own, but because, in the centuries that have passed since Hengest and Horsa led their followers into Britain, many triumphs of government have taken place, and much knowledge has been gained of which we must make use; and many mistakes have been made and atoned for by much suffering, the repetition of which we must as studiously strive to avoid.

Mr. Marbury, in his scholarly lecture recently delivered in this hall, told us of the beginnings of the English state and of the birth of the parliamentary idea. We will now consider the growth of that idea into a more nearly modern conception of Parliament as a representative body, and trace its progress, especially through what is known as the Tudor period, to the days of the Stuart kings.

However remote our studies of the forms of English government, though they lead us back until we are lost in the mists of antiquity, we never find a time when our ancestors were without some kind of national assembly, assisting in or controlling the work of government. But the character and powers of this body have varied greatly with the times. It is stated with force, and supported by authority worthy of consideration, by the eminent writer whose

words we quote below, that the true beginning of Parliament is to be found in the cura regis as established by William the Norman and developed by his successors, and that so late as the beginning of the fourteenth century the principal business of Parliament was to dispense justice. In the writings of Fleta, compiled about this time, we find this expression: habet enim rex curiam suam in consilio suo in parliamentis suis. Speaking with reference to the growth of the parliamentary idea from that of the curia regis, Dr. A. F. Pollard, the learned professor of English history in the University of London, in his notable work, "The Evolution of Parliament," uses these words:

All origins are, however, obscure, not merely from the defect of records, but because they are imperceptible to contemporary observers; and it is a shallow interpretation to regard Parliament as the creation of Simon de Montfort or of Edward I, or indeed as a creation at all. It is rather a growth from roots stretching back beyond the thirteenth century to a period long before the summons of burgesses or even of knights of the shire to Westminster. The issue of Simon's and Edward's writs did not evoke a new institution out of the void; they merely grafted new buds on to the old stock of the curia regis, and it was the legal sap of the ancient stem that fed and maintained the life of the medieval Parliament. The species, indeed, was the same, otherwise the grafting would have failed; for law is a branch of politics, and even the seed of representation was raised in a legal frame.

Parliament as we know it took its rise in the thirteenth century. The ideas of election and representation had long been known to our forefathers and locally used in many ways, notably in the folkmoot of the shire, but had never been extended to the formation and use of a national body. The first instance of county representation in a body anything like a Parliament occurred in 1213, when King John issued his writs to the sheriffs directing that "four discreet knights of each shire" be sent to him at Oxford "ad loquendum nobiscum de negotiis regni nostri." The name

of Parliament to designate the national assembly was first used in 1246, with reference to a general assembly of the barons at London.

The second instance of county representation in Parliament and the first in which we can be sure that the representatives were elected and not merely summoned, occurred in 1254 when the king, Henry III, being away at the wars in Gascony and finding himself in desperate need of supplies, directed the regents (his mother, Queen Eleanor, and his brother, the Earl of Cornwall) to issue writs to the sheriffs summoning to a Great Council at Westminster "two lawful and discreet knights from each county, whom the men of that county shall have chosen for this purpose in the place of each and all of them, to consider, together with the knights of the other counties, what aid they will grant the king in such an emergency." A far cry, this, from the peremptory demands which would have been made by William the Norman in like circumstances.

Little of immediate consequence was accomplished by the assembly thus constituted, but the idea of making provision for the king's financial needs by a representative body whose members were elected at home and not summoned from the throne, was born, and the era of representative government in national affairs had made a beginning. It is in the development of the idea of representative government that the Anglo-Saxon genius for political organization shows to best advantage. The choice by a large number of persons living within defined boundaries of a few of their number to act for them in matters of legislation is the controlling thought here and is of primary importance. Representative government is the golden mean that lies between the equally dangerous extremes of autocracy and pure democracy, between the absolute rule of an individual and an equally irresponsible rule of the mob. At its best it is a system of government in the machinery of which the

centripetal and centrifugal forces are exactly balanced. It is the happy medium between that absolutism which paralyzed the growth of Persia and that pure democracy which so speedily and completely wrecked the Athenian Republic; between that absolutism which, in our own day, was the curse of Russia, and that communism which has since made Russia the greatest menace to the peace of the world. It is this principle, begun and developed in England, that has made its influence felt in the great national assemblies of the world, so that to-day an inability to apply it is taken as proof of the political incapacity of any nation which has made a failure of the experiment.

From this point, the growth of the parliamentary idea was irregular but rapid. On June 11, 1258, national discontent, because of the persistence with which Henry III disregarded the provisions of Magna Carta, being at its height, there met at Oxford that gathering of irate nobles called "The Mad Parliament." The Provisions of Oxford were the result of their deliberations, by which the king was stripped of his powers of government and they were confided to the care of a committee of twenty-four barons. Civil war resulted; the king was defeated and captured in 1264 and the supreme power rested in the hands of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and brother-in-law of the king. Seldom has so much power, so violently acquired, been put to better or less selfish use. Ruling in the king's name, De Montfort summoned his first Parliament, composed of four lawful and discreet knights from each shire, to London. Again, on December 14, 1264, he issued writs directing the sheriffs to return two knights from each shire, two citizens from each city, and two burgesses from each borough. By this act, which has won for De Montfort the well-deserved title of "Founder of the House of Commons,' the powerful element representing the numerous and growing towns of England was admitted for the first time into

the councils of the nation, and Parliament became more truly representative than before. On August 4, 1265, De Montfort deserted by many of those whose interests he had labored hardest to serve, was defeated and slain by the royal forces at Evesham, and by his generous conduct in life and the heroic circumstances of his death afforded another illustration of the hard fate that so often awaits those who would best serve mankind. But though the brave earl gave up his life in defense of the cause of representative government, the happy influences of his work endured.

Little more of progress is noted in the growth of truly representative government until April, 1275, when Edward I, the victor of the battle of Evesham, summoned his first general Parliament at Westminster, and a statute was there enacted granting to the king certain revenues, mostly in the nature of excises, an indication that Englishmen, through their representatives, were gradually coming nearer to complete control of the public purse and that a system was being worked out whereby the financial resources of the entire kingdom could be mobilized when necessary for the defense of the realm. Again, in 1294, a Parliament was summoned for the purpose of making a grant of financial aid to the hard-pressed sovereign; and, finally, in 1295, was taken one of the most memorable steps in all the history of English government, when writs were issued for the summoning of what later came to be known as the "Model Parliament." Here, for the first time, were represented in one Parliament the three great classes of the English people. The lords, spiritual and temporal, summoned by personal writ, were there; likewise came the elected representatives of the shires and the boroughs, chosen in the old way; there, too, were the representatives of the lower clergy, but finding the associations uncongenial these soon withdrew and established the system of taxing themselves through their own "convocations," which