It may be conceded that the framers of Magna Carta builded better than they knew, and likewise that many of the traditions as to the intent, meaning and scope of its provisions--traditions which were so potent and inspiring during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--were founded, as is now asserted, upon legends and myths. Yet, these legends and traditions, growing up and clustering around Magna Carta, served to keep alive and perpetuate its spirit. They generated the sentiment which impelled men to patriotic and heroic sacrifice in the cause of liberty; they sustained generation after generation in the recurring struggles for political justice and equality before the law; they formed and preserved a public morality which prevented violations of the principles of the Great Charter, and they were of incalculable inspiration and encouragement to Englishmen and Americans, if not to the whole world. The great traditions of Magna Carta have made its heritage peculiarly valuable and its service to humanity immortal. It is because of these traditions that Magna Carta is doubly sacred to us, as it was to our forefathers. Many of us, however, venture to believe that the unknown author of the original Articles of the Barons or of the Great Charter itself--if it was not the learned Stephen Langton, who had been educated at the University of Paris and was familiar with Roman and canonical law and the charters of liberties which the kings of France had been granting to their subjects--knew far more of the underlying and vivifying principles of jurisprudence and politics than some of our modern critics are willing to attribute to that generation. Be this as it may, the political instinct of our race must have guided the framers to the eternal truths upon which the Great Charter of Liberties was based, even though they imperfectly comprehended these truths, or did not comprehend them at all. A single phrase like "the law of the land" in a political document is often wiser than is realized, not merely by the masses who acclaim it, but even by the leaders who write it. It may happily serve to preserve and compress into very small compass the relics of ancient wisdom, notwithstanding the fact that later generations are frequently puzzled to decipher the contents and discover the meaning. Such a phrase, as has been well said of the language of a nation, "sometimes locks up truths which were once well known, but which in the course of ages have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination, ... and often it would seem as though rays of truths, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking up to heaven."[2]