In their religion, philosophy, poetry, oratory, and literature they have always confessed that oppression was venal and wrong. If selfishness, greed, or pride have allured them for a while from that royal path of national rectitude and honor, they have in the final test returned conquering to their true and higher selves. Their inborn hate of oppression, their magnanimous and tolerant spirit of freedom gloriously in the ascendant. Thus it is that the free institutions of Great Britain and America have grown and towered in strength, and in their onward march startled the world by their progress, and appalled the very lips of prophecy by their bold and daring sweep. They will not stop, for liberty is fearless and the current of freedom is irresistible. But in the early Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth, the rights, liberties, and privileges of the citizen were not as broad and full as we find them to-day. The spirit of liberty was weak at first, but her demands grew apace with her strength. Neither by the generosity of princes, nor by the wisdom of legislation, were the ordinary English rights of free citizenship enlarged and established. Nor are the first and elemental principles of free government which we find springing up on English soil after the conquests, and whose history in the re-establishment of political liberty we shall trace through countless struggles and repressions, the original of that divine idea of freedom which it has been the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to give to the world. It is but a part of that great race spirit which the Conqueror could not conquer; the lingering spirit of freedom which the iron heel of despotic usurpation could not stamp out, the memory of a lost freedom ranking in the hearts of men determined to restore in their island home those ancient rights which no man dared to question in the days of the Saxon, Edward the Confessor. The condition of the early Saxon as it was raised by the wisdom and benevolence of good King Alfred, and as it remained until the end of the reign of the unfortunate Harold, was that of a freeman, a freeman not merely in the sense of being his own master, but "he was a living unit in the State." He held his lands in his own right. He attended the courts, and entered in their deliberations. He bore arms and, by authority of law, could use them in his own defense. The animating principle of Anglo-Saxon government was local sovereignty. Matters from the smallest to the greatest were vested in the local power. * * * * *