The outline on Constitutional History has served its purpose with my own classes, and in the ninth grade of our grammar department of the Practice School it is used as the basis for more detailed work. The fact that a large majority of the pupils who are to be benefited by public instruction finish their technical education with the last year in the grammar schools makes it imperative that a course in American institutions and politics be presented which shall make intelligible to them the great race movement of which they are an integral part.

At the same time that I offer this work to my fellows in the profession, I beg to acknowledge my gratitude to those friends who have assisted me with aid, advice, and criticism. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University, Cambridge, and Judge Samuel P. Hadley, of Lowell, Mass., have guided me materially in my research for contemporaneous and latter-day comments. Mr. Henry A. Clapp, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, has given most generously of his time in making translations from certain Latin texts. The Hon. James O. Lyford, naval officer of customs, Boston, Mass., has added to the varied suggestions and services of years by following the work of the outline with critical interest. I am indebted to the Librarians of the Harvard Library, Massachusetts State Library, and the Lowell City Library for their courteous liberality in the use of books.

I take this opportunity to thank the various authors and publishers of copyright works from which material has been drawn, for permission to reprint the passages desired. The full titles of these works, with publishers' names, are given in Appendix D at the end of this volume.

LOWELL, MASS., November, 1900.

MABEL HILL.

INTRODUCTION

THA

HAT history is based on sources no longer needs assertion; that the public state papers of the nation are among the most important sources for an understanding of the true spirit of past times has been a familiar truth since Dr. Stubbs put forth his immortal volume of Select Charters; no careful student and no thoughtful teacher any longer attempts to investigate or to present history without reading and thinking about the constitutional sources. Dr. Stubbs, however,

was one of the men most aware that a document does not explain itself; it was his practice in his classes to expound and criticise his own charters. As the knowledge of, and publication of, materials has widened, choice and a suggestive arrangement have become more and more important in making up useful collections; and there is now a great mass of intelligent discussion by historians and publicists, which may be drawn upon by those who have been unable to sit at the feet of the masters. It is an encouragement to those most interested in history that there seems a demand for reprints of properly selected sources, and especially of constitutional documents illustrated by some reference to contemporary writers, set forth by adequate comment, and so arranged as to bring out the development of a nation's constitutional progress.

Miss Hill, in her Liberty Documents, has undertaken to provide for what is believed to be an interest in the foundations of English and American free government: at the same time she has endeavoured to avoid some of the obvious difficulties in

dealing with official and sometimes technical documents, by supplementing them with the light and life of discussion. The most approved method of historical teaching for schools of various grades, seems to be a text-book, backed up by reading both in the sources and in secondary books. Miss Hill has in this book brought about an ingenious and promising combination of the two sorts of historical material; and she has further divided the authors whom she uses, according as they wrote at or near the date of the documents, or as they came afterward, and could use the learning that had meantime accumulated. Out of the immense number of interesting and important documents in English and American constitutional history, Miss Hill has chosen twenty-four documents, or groups of documents, which include the great monuments of Anglo-Saxon liberty, and at the same time are sufficiently representative of the mass of omitted papers. Each of these documents she has prefaced with appropriate "Suggestions" which include some statement of the historical conditions under which the document first saw the light, and in a few words shows the relation of each piece with other materials of the same kind. Then follows in each case the "text" of the document.

The earlier

pieces, such as Magna Charta and the Confirmatio Chartarum, were written in Latin; and therefore translations have been reprinted, or made expressly for this volume. The English documents of the seventeenth century were of course first written with the spelling, capitalization, and abbreviations usual at that time, and they have been transliterated by substituting the ordinary form for the long s, and reducing the capitalization and spelling to modern usage. The documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are in general reproduced verbatim. In all cases an authentic text has been examined and compared, and omissions are indicated. As an example of the technical phraseology of English statutes, and in order to put at the convenience of the schools the full text,

of a document very hard to find in full, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 has been reprinted exactly as it stands, as an Appendix.

After the text of each document follows the next feature of the book, the "Contemporary Exposition," especially helpful because it shows why our ancestors felt that the great documents were essential to them and their posterity. The range of writers on English constitutional matters is ample; and Miss Hill has been successful in finding plenty of appropriate and striking criticisms. An example, and one of the most quaint things in the book is Bishop Burnet's humorous account of the parliamentary trick by which the Habeas Corpus Act came to be passed. In the American part of the work good contemporary comment abounds, and most of the famous American statesmen have been drawn upon, together with pamphleteers and public speakers.

The fourth part of each chapter is the "Critical Comment," made up of approved criticisms from a considerable number of authors; here the best brief histories of England and the United States have been drawn upon, together with such special authorities on constitutional development as Stubbs, Hallam, Pollock and Maitland, Gneist, Boutmy, Blackstone, Borgeaud, Dicey, Curtis, Story, Bryce, Cooley, and Dunning. It is to be understood that these extracts are not chosen to defend a thesis or to favour any bias in Miss Hill's mind. She has taken pains to draw from people of different and even of opposing views; and to quote from authors who seem to sum up the results of the discussions and investigations of a succession of publicists.

The purpose of this work, then, is in brief to place some of the most important memorials of history of the Anglo-Saxon race in a suitable and illuminating setting; the document itself in a carefully verified text; the opinions of contemporaries who are interested and competent; later comment of scientific

writers, who have studied the documents through the perspective of human progress.

For such a work Miss Hill has long felt the need; in her own work as a teacher in secondary and normal schools, she has found it possible to interest young people in such studies of the institutional side of English and American history; the book therefore represents what may be, and actually is, taught in schools. None of these documents are beyond the grasp of a properly directed child of fourteen, and the book is easy to handle because it contains the materials for its own discussion.

A glance at the Table of Contents will show the principles which have been kept in mind in putting the book together. First of all will be noticed the long reach of the selections: the first document was written in 1101; the last report of a speech is still hardly dry from the press. The results of eight centuries of constitutional effort are stated or suggested in this volume.

The book is an example also of the modern discovery that history is as continuous as geology; that so-called political revolutions are, like earthquakes and volcanic outbreaks, the sudden yielding to strains which have been growing more intense from year to year and age to age, till there is no longer a power of resistance. The book brings into clear and sharp relief the great truth that English and American constitutional history has run practically one course. The first ten chapters show the growth of English personal liberty down to the beginning of the eighteenth century; Chapters XI. to XIV. exemplify the change in the eighteenth century and the Revolution, from an English to an American form of statement of the principles of freedom. From Chapter XV. to the end, we find a record of the establishment and the growth of written constitutional guarantees in America. These three periods are really not separable from each other: for English institutions run into Colonial charters, and thence into State constitutions,