The Beginnings of New England. Fiske John

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СКАЧАТЬ a date for the beginning of anything, and we can by no means fix a date for the beginning of representative assemblies in England. We can only say that where we first find traces of county organization, we find traces of representation. Clearly, if the English conquerors of Britain had left the framework of Roman institutions standing there, as it remained standing in Gaul, there would have been great danger of this principle of representation not surviving. It would most likely have been crushed in its callow infancy. The conquerors would insensibly have fallen into the Roman way of doing things, as they did in Gaul. [[Sidenote: Survival and development of Teutonic representative assembly in England]

      From the start, then, we find the English nationality growing up under very different conditions from those which obtained in other parts of Europe. So far as institutions are concerned, Teutonism was less modified in England than in the German fatherland itself, For the gradual conquest and Christianization of Germany which began with Charles the Great, and went on until in the thirteenth century the frontier had advanced eastward to the Vistula, entailed to a certain extent the romanization of Germany. For a thousand years after Charles the Great, the political head of Germany was also the political head of the Holy Roman Empire, and the civil and criminal code by which the daily life of the modern German citizen is regulated is based upon the jurisprudence of Rome. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate more forcibly than this sheer contrast the peculiarly Teutonic character of English civilization. Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment succeeded in seizing the crown. Of the invasion of partially romanized Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so profoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law, and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of English migration to America—the Virginia stream and the New England stream—alike had their source. [[Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic institutions less modified in England than in Germany]

      By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits generated by long experience of local representative assemblies—habits which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits of the grand combination were first, the wresting of Magna Charta from King John in 1215, and secondly, the meeting of the first House of Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century and the American Revolution; and among the founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names of Cromwell and Washington. Simon's great victory at Lewes in 1264 must rank with Naseby and Yorktown. The work begun by his House of Commons was the same work that has continued to go on without essential interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way, we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the day of peril is yet past. From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear; they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery. But the gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against which people's minds have not yet been fortified with traditional sentiments and phrases. The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize upon the fruits of other people's labour is still very strong, and while we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the polls their hordes of bribed retainers. Well indeed has it been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. God never meant that in this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty]

      To return to Earl Simon, we see that it was just in that wonderful thirteenth century, when the Roman idea of government might seem to have been attaining its richest and most fruitful development, that the richer and more fruitful English idea first became incarnate in the political constitution of a great and rapidly growing nation. It was not long before the struggle between the Roman Idea and the English Idea, clothed in various forms, became the dominating issue in European history. We have now to observe the rise of modern nationalities, as new centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other, as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place. Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of modern nationalities. [[Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]

      The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant. The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II. unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years under the СКАЧАТЬ