who had given up an usurped power which they ought never to have held should be restored to the enjoyment of a natural right which ought never to have been taken from them. As our present Sovereign in so many other respects holds the place of Ælfred rather than the place of the Richards and Henries of later times, so she again holds the right which Ælfred held, of acquiring and disposing of private property like any other member of the nation(30). These examples are, I hope, enough to make out my case. In each of them modern legislation has swept away the arbitrary inferences of lawyers, and has gone back to those simpler principles which the untutored wisdom of our forefathers never thought of calling in question. I could easily make the list much longer. Every act which has restrained the arbitrary prerogative of the Crown, every act which has secured or increased either the powers of Parliament or the liberty of the subject, has been a return, sometimes to the letter, at all times to the spirit, of our earliest Law. But I would enlarge on one point only, the most important point of all, and a point in which we may at first sight seem, not to have come nearer, but to have gone away further from the principles of early times. I mean with regard to the succession to the Crown. The Crown was of old, as I have already said, elective. No man had a right to become King till he had been called to the kingly office by the choice of the Assembly of the nation. No man actually was King till he had been admitted to the kingly office by the consecration of the Church. The doctrines that the King never dies, that the throne never can be vacant, that there can be no interregnum, that the reign of the next heir begins the moment the reign of his predecessor is ended, are all figments of later times. No signs of such doctrines can be found at any time earlier than the accession of Edward the First(31). The strong preference which in early times belonged to members of the kingly house, above all to the born son of a crowned King(32), gradually grew, under the influences which the Norman Conquest finally confirmed, into the doctrine of absolute hereditary right. That doctrine grew along with the general growth of the royal power; it grew as men gradually came to look on kingship as a possession held by a single man for his own profit, rather than as an office bestowed by the people for the common good of the realm. It might seem that, in this respect at least, we have not gone forward, but that we rather have gone back. For nothing is more certain than that the Crown is more strictly and undoubtedly hereditary now than it was in the days of Normans, Angevins, or Tudors. But a little thought will show that in this case also, we have not gone back but have gone forward. That is to say, we have gone forward by going back, by going back, in this case, not to the letter, but assuredly to the spirit of earlier times.