To restore their ancient significance, expanded in conformity with a larger order of things, to the traditional formulae, demanded just the type of experience which was furnished by the modern Nation-state. The growth of Nation-states in modern Europe was in progress, we are told, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. And it is towards and after the close of this period, and especially in the seventeenth century when the national consciousness of the English people, as of others, had become thoroughly awakened, that political speculation in the strict sense begins again, {12} after an interval extending back to the Politics of Aristotle. To let one example serve for many; when we read John of Gaunt’s praises of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II., we feel ourselves at once in contact with the mind of a social unity, such as necessarily to raise in any inquiring intelligence all those problems which were raised for Plato and Aristotle by the individuality of Athens and Sparta. And so we see the earliest political speculation of the modern world groping, as it were, for ideas by help of which to explain the experience of an individual self-governing sovereign society. And for the most part the ideas that offer themselves are those of Roman Jurisprudence, but distorted by political applications and by the rhetoric of Protestant fanaticism. As Mr. Ritchie [1] points out, the conception of natural right and a law of nature makes a strange but effective coalition with the temper of the Wycliffite cry “When Adam dalf, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?” The notions of contract, of force, of representation in a single legal “person,” are now applied separately or together to the phenomenon of the self-governing individual community. But the solution remains imperfect, and the fundamental fact of self-government refuses to be construed either as the association of individuals, originally free and equal, for certain limited purposes, or as the absolute absorption of their wills in the “person” of a despotic sovereign. [1] _Natural Rights_, p. 8.