- - Character of George III. Sympathy of Englishmen with the American struggle. A strife on both sides of the ocean. Ability and number of pro-American advocates. - Fear for English liberty if America was conquered. Position of Burke. — The masses pro-American.— Strength of Tories in America. Their wealth and position. - Their expatriation. - Pathetic circumstances of their story. 192 - The written Constitution a unique feature of the American - - did not join the United States. - Voyages of Cook. - Dis- - - - - - - - Colonial Exhibition of 1886.- Extension of Anglo-Saxon - It must be administered by - - - Permanence of the Federal Constitution.- Distrust of leg- islatures as indicated by the State constitutions. — Condi- tion of the primordial cell of an Anglo-Saxon polity, the popular moot. — Examination of rural America.- Local self-government in New England. - Influences which im- pair the character of the town-meeting. Picture of it thirty years since. - Tributes to its value. - Settlement of the West. Ordinance of 1787.- Local self-govern- ment in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois. - The Township-County system of the Northwest.—The County system of the South. Virginia continues to be typical of the South.- The Township-County system the perfect type. — Exam- ination of urban America. - Growth and multiplication of cities. Their government the most conspicuous fail- ure of the United States. - Eagerness to remedy the abuses. there have been periods of temporary submergence, adaptation to the needs of ever vaster multitudes and higher civilizations, manifold development and elaboration one spirit, however, has survived through all, apparent in the deliberations of a modern Congress or Parliament, as also it was apparent in the ancient folk-moots, where the free ceorls chose their army leaders and regulated the life in their marks. While works upon the constitutional history, both of England and America, abound, they for the most part appeal, both as to style and size, rather to the scholar and the statesman, than to the general reader and the youthful student. Moreover, in such works it has too seldom happened that the constitutional history of the English-speaking race has been regarded en solidarité: but in this way it is both proper and expedient to regard that history. England and America are mother and child; the polity of the latter in its origin is a mere outflow from that of the former, the two constitutional streams since the divergence flowing constantly parallel and mutually reacting. Our frequent complaint is that Englishmen fail to understand us; just so, we fail to understand them. Says the Westminster Review, for March, 1889: "England's sternest, coldest, most critical censors, I have found among descendants of the old settlers; surely they retain something of ancient Puritan bitterness. The source of estrangement I am inclined to trace largely to the fact that the average American reads no history but United States history, and he can hardly be said to study that." Certainly, to set right the "average American," and also the average Englishman, is a task worth essaying. There ought to be room for a book succinct and simple in its terms, which should tell to busy men and to youth in the class-room, the story of Anglo-Saxon freedom; for as James Bryce has said: "It is a matter of the first consequence that the relation to one another of the two branches of the English-speaking race should be more fully understood and realized." In the execution of such a task the difficulties are not small. How to preserve a proper historical perspective while viewing upon so reduced a scale such a multitude of events and figures? What guides to select in threading one's way through the long ages? There is no period through which one must not proceed with care, and the embarrassments are perhaps as great with respect to times close at hand as with respect to times remote. While this book was in preparation, the establishment of the County Councils has restored to the English shires their ancient local self-government; since it was ready for the printer six Commonwealths have been added to the American Union; as it awaits its publication, an Anglo-Saxon protectorate extends itself more and more widely over Africa, and the federation of Australia may become any month an accomplished fact. These are all events noteworthy in the history of Anglo-Saxon freedom, as are still others of which the newspapers weekly give report. How to catch them accurately and in due proportion?-As to remote ages, the darkness due to the remoteness is further deepened by the controversies of scholars. The employment of representation has commonly been held to be characteristic of Anglo-Saxon societies in the most distant epochs ; but this honor is now denied to them by authorities deserving of high respect, who find no good evidence of the existence of a representative system until after the Norman conquest. Mr. Frederic Seebohm, in his "English Village Communities," fails to see that the Anglo-Saxon invaders brought with them any freedom at all, as they set up their tuns and scires in their new home in the settlements that were established a lord ruled as master, with a society under him in a condition of villenage; the free village community was by no means the type, but from the first a marked feudalism in which the mass of men were serfs. : Still more sweepingly, Mr. H. C. Coote, in his "Romans of Britain," will have it that the AngloSaxons transmitted to us not only no freedom, but nothing else. They were simply a horde of invading savages, exercising for a time dominion over a people they had conquered, who much surpassed them in civilization, — a horde which was at length annihilated by the Danes, leaving no trace of itself or its influence; for, thinks Mr. Coote, all that we have called Anglo-Saxon, in blood, tongue, or institutions, ought to be ascribed to a different stock, and has received the name only through mistake. While at the two extremes of the subject embarrassments thus abound, certain intermediate periods are scarcely more free. In the English colonization of America, for instance, the extent to which the new country followed the precedents of the old is not a matter upon which all are agreed. The "new historical school," of which E. A. Freeman may be regarded as the founder, and of which the most characteristic publications in America are the historical and politi |