It was in the days of Elizabeth that something of the ancient spirit again breathed forth. It is then that we come to the beginning of that long line of parliamentary worthies which stretches on in unbroken order from her days to our own. A few daring spirits in the Commons’ House now began once more to speak in tones worthy of those great Assemblies which had taught the Edwards and the Richards that there was a power in England mightier than their own(67). Under the puny successor of the great Queen the voice of freedom was heard more loudly(68). In the next reign the great strife of all came, and a King of England once more, as in the days of Henry and Simon, stood forth in arms against his people to learn that the power of his people was a greater power than his. But in the seventeenth century, just as in the thirteenth, men did not ask for any rights and powers which were admitted to be new; they asked only for the better security of those rights and powers which had been handed on from days of old. Into the details of that great struggle and of the times which followed it is not my purpose to enter. I have traced at some length the origin and growth of our Constitution from the earliest times to its days of special trial in the days of Tudor and Stewart despotism. Our later constitutional history rather belongs to an inquiry of another kind. It is mainly a record of silent changes in the practical working of institutions whose outward and legal form remained untouched. I will therefore end my consecutive historical sketch—if consecutive it can claim to be—at the point which we have now reached. Instead of carrying on any regular constitutional narrative into times nearer to our own, I will rather choose, as the third part of my subject, the illustration of one of the special points with which I set out, namely the power which our gradual developement has given us of retracing our steps, of falling back, whenever need calls for falling back, on the principles of earlier, often of the earliest, times. Wittingly or unwittingly, much of our best modern legislation has, as I have already said, been a case of advancing by the process of going back. As the last division of the work which I have taken in hand, I shall try to show in how many cases we have, as a matter of fact, gone back from the cumbrous and oppressive devices of feudal and royalist lawyers to the sounder, freer, and simpler principles of the days of our earliest freedom. CHAPTER III.