And there is another invention--if we can call it one--to my mind of far greater importance, which I should urge was also peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people; that is, the invention or the idea of personal liberty; which is understood, and always has been understood, by Anglo-Saxons in a sense in which it never existed before, so far as I know, in any people in the history of the world. It is that notion of personal liberty which was the cause of representative government, not representative government that was the cause of personal liberty. In other words, the people did not get up a parliament for the sake of having that parliament enact laws securing personal liberty. It was the result of a condition of personal liberty which prevailed among them and in their laws that resulted in representative government, and in the institution of a legislature, making, as we now would say, the laws; though a thousand years ago they never said that a legislature _made_ laws, they only said that it _told what the laws were_. This is another very important distinction. The "law" of the free Anglo-Saxon people was regarded as a thing existing by itself, like the sunlight, or at least as existing like a universally accepted custom observed by every one. It was five hundred years before the notion crept into the minds, even of the members of the British Parliaments, that they could make a _new_ law. What they supposed they did, and what they were understood by the people to do, was merely to _declare_ the law, as it was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always being--and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are, the more they have that notion--that their free laws and customs were something which came from the beginning of the world, which they always held, which were immutable, no more to be changed than the forces of nature; and that no parliament, under the free Anglo-Saxon government, or later under the Norman kings, who tried to make them unfree, no king, could ever _make_ a law, but could only declare what the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is _jus dare_, and _jus dicere_. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the Parliament never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I said, not only what it was then, but what it had been, as they supposed, for thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make _new_ laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament. How did it arise? The English Parliament,[1] as you doubtless know, was the successor, or grew out of the old Witenagemot, the old Saxon Great Council, and that Great Council originally--and I am now talking of centuries before the Conquest--the Witenagemot, included in theory all the free inhabitants of the realm, just as a modern town meeting does. Mind you, they were then tribes, living in "Hundreds." They were not nations, not even states and counties, and in early times it probably