from changing out of the mere love of abstract theory. We have thus been able to advance, if somewhat slowly, yet the more surely; and when we have made a false step, we have been able to retrace it. On this last power, the power of undoing whatever has been done amiss, I wish specially to insist. In tracing the steps by which our Constitution has grown into its present shape, I shall try specially to show in how many cases the best acts of modern legislation have been, wittingly or unwittingly, a falling back on the principles of our earliest times. In my first chapter I tried to show how our fathers brought with them into the Isle of Britain those primæval institutions which were common to them with the whole Teutonic race. I tried to show how those institutions were modified in the course of time by the circumstances of the English Conquest of Britain, and by the events which followed that Conquest. I showed how the kingly power grew with every increase of the territorial extent of the kingdom; how the old nobility of birth gave way to a new nobility of personal relation to the sovereign; and how the effect of these changes seems to have been to make it easier for the individual freeman of the lower rank to rise, but at the same time to lower the position of the ordinary freemen as a class. This last change was still more largely brought about as an independent result of the same changes which tended to increase the kingly power. In a state of things where representation is unknown, where every freeman is an elector and a lawgiver, but where, if he exercises his elective and legislative rights, he must exercise them directly in his own person—in such a state of things as this every increase of the national territory makes those rights of less practical value, and causes the actual powers of government to be shut up in the hands of a smaller body. There is no doubt that in the earliest Teutonic assemblies every freeman had his place. There is no doubt that in England every freeman kept his place in the smaller local assemblies of the _mark_, the _hundred_, and the _shire_(4). He still, where modern legislation has not wholly swept it away, keeps, as I hinted in my former lecture, some faint shadow of the old right when he gives a vote in the assembly, in which the assembly of the mark still lives on, that is, in the vestry of his parish. But how as to the great assembly of all, the Assembly of the Wise, the Witenagemót of the whole realm? No ancient record gives us any clear or formal account of the constitution of that body. It is commonly spoken of in a vague way as a gathering of the wise, the noble, the great men(5). But, alongside of passages like these, we find other passages which speak of it in a way which implies a far more popular constitution. King Eadward is said to be chosen King by “all folk.” Earl Godwine “makes his speech before the King and all the people of the land.” Judicial sentences and other acts of authority