WITH CONTEMPORARY EXPOSITION Selected and Prepared BY MABEL HILL STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS Edited, with an Entroduction BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, PH.D. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY JF •H65 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. All rights reserved. UNIVERSITY PRESS. JOHN WILSON PREFACE THE 'HE design of this book is to direct students to the evolution of constitutional government from the time of the declared policy of Henry I. towards his subjects to the present day. Its broader purpose is stated in detail in the Introduction, but a few brief words of explanation and acknowledgments of criticism and assistance give occasion for this Preface. The following chapters are the result of informal lectures given before my classes at the State Normal School in Lowell, Massachusetts, where we have for several years followed a course of study in Constitutional History (as given in the Outlines in the Appendix of this volume). In preparing students for the profession of public school teaching, I have deemed it wise to impress them with the underlying principles of citizenship and government, and to prove to them that the love of liberty is a noble inheritance of the past. In the special study of these written bulwarks of our freedom my aim has been to further the interest in original documents by comparing the details of the different articles, by discussing their bearing, by pointing out the development of constitutional history, and by noting the evolution of one document of liberty from the preceding one. The book makes no pretensions to exhaustive exposition, either of the documents discussed or of the critical material cited. It is meant as an aid to teacher and pupil whose time for historical research is limited, and it is but suggestive of the possibilities of further intensive study. |