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A SHORT HISTORY OF ANGLO-SAXON

FREEDOM

OF

ANGLO-SAXON FREEDOM

THE POLITY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING RACE

OUTLINED IN ITS INCEPTION, DEVELOPMENT, diffusion,
AND PRESENT CONDITION

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PROFESSOR IN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF "A LIFE OF SAMUEL
ADAMS," "A LIFE OF YOUNG SIR HENRY VANE," ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1903

COPYRIGHT, 1890,

BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

PREFACE.

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In this book an effort has been made to compress a sketch of constitutional history for a period of nearly two thousand years, from the time of the Teutons of Cæsar and Tacitus to the British Empire and the United States of 1890. It is not the polity of any single people that is outlined, but that of the English-speaking race, that body to-day perhaps one hundred and twenty millions strong, scattered in several nationalities actual or incipient, which upon all the continents and all the great islands of the world, stands now so in the foreground of attention. It is a polity one and the same in its essence in England, in the United States, in Australia, in Canada: one and the same in its essence, moreover, as viewed in the institutions of to-day and in those of the North Germans of the time of Christ. As Sir Francis Palgrave says: "The new building has been raised upon the old groundwork; the institutions of one age have always been modelled and formed from those of the preceding, and the lineal descent has never been interrupted or disturbed." Anglo-Saxon freedom is most simply and comprehensively stated in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." In its long history 348656

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