duration of the existing Parliament(24). Truly this is a case where the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life. The doctrine which had been inferred by unanswerable logic from an utterly worthless premiss has been cast aside in favour of the dictate of common sense. We have learned that the moment when the State has lost its head is the last moment which we ought to choose for depriving it of its body also. Here then is a notable instance of the way in which the latest legislation of England has fallen back upon the principles of the earliest. Here is a point on which the eleventh century and the nineteenth are of one mind, and on which the fanciful scruples of the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries are no longer listened to. Let us take another instance. In the old Teutonic Constitution, just as in the old Roman Constitution, large tracts of land were the property of the State, the _ager publicus_ of Rome, the _folkland_ of England. As the royal power grew, as the King came to be more and more looked on as the impersonation of the nation, the land of the people came to be more and more looked on as the land of the King, and the _folkland_ of our Old-English charters gradually changed into the _Terra Regis_ of Domesday(25). Like other changes of the kind, the Norman Conquest only strengthened and brought to its full effect a tendency which was already at work; but there can be no doubt that, down to the Norman Conquest, the King at least went through the form of consulting his Witan, before he alienated the land of the people to become the possession of an individual—in Old-English phrase, before he turned _folkland_ into _bookland_(26). After the Norman Conquest we hear no more of the land of the people; it has become the land of the King, to be dealt with according to the King’s personal pleasure. From the days of the first William to those of the Third, the land which had once been the land of the people was dealt with without any reference to the will of the people. Under a conscientious King it might be applied to the real service of the State, or bestowed as the reward of really faithful servants of the State. Under an unconscientious King it might be squandered broadcast among his minions or his mistresses(27). Now this wrong too is redressed. A custom as strong as law now requires that, at the beginning of each fresh reign, the Sovereign shall, not by an act of bounty but by an act of justice, give back to the nation the land which the nation lost so long ago. The royal demesnes are now handed over to be dealt with like the other revenues of the State, to be disposed of by Parliament for the public service(28). That is to say, the people have won back their own; the usurpation of the days of foreign rule has been swept away. We have in this case too gone back to the sound principles of our forefathers; the _Terra Regis_ of the Norman has once more become the _folkland_ of the days of our earliest freedom.