For the boys and girls who have studied their English history and their Colonial history with care and intelligence, only a brief review of the antecedents of the Constitution will be necessary. Nevertheless, this review should not be neglected. Once more the teacher should insist upon the fact that the roots of American civil and political institutions are to be found in English soil. Transplanted to America in the seventeenth century, these institutions were affected and modified by local conditions, but in their origin they were essentially English. The study of the Constitution should therefore begin with a brief reconsideration of the English system of government, its origin and development, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far more important than the system of government, however, was the system of law and the theory of the right of the individual to freedom from unjust impositions by the government which the colonists inherited from the mother country. Not until the student is able to state again, and accurately, the fundamental principles of Magna Carta, of the Petition of Rights and of the Bill of Rights should the teacher proceed to the consideration of other subjects, for the very language of these documents will appear again in the first nine amendments to our present Constitution. Next, the teacher should review with his students the history of the establishment of the various groups of colonies, their forms of government, the various methods of colonial legislative, executive, and judicial procedure, the rights and duties of the governor, the method of election and the powers and functions of both houses of the colonial assemblies, the rights and duties of the judiciary: one and all, these served as models which were freely studied and adopted by the members of the Constitutional Convention.