dare stay away. And when they were in his royal palace they did not like to refuse the king's demands, even though they knew they would be unpopular at home if they promised him a generous grant. The best they could do was to make as good a bargain as possible. If they granted the king money, would he not listen to their petitions and redress certain wrongs? By and by they succeeded in making it the regular order of procedure that petitions should be heard first before taxes were granted. Petitions were put into the form of bills to which the king had to answer yes or no, and thus the right of lawmaking and sharing in the government was secured by landowners and towns, through bargains rather than through battles. Here again liberties were first bought for certain small groups, and then gradually extended when villeins and artisans came to share in freedom. When liberties had been obtained for special groups, From the next step was to extend these liberties to all men, so that there came to be equal rights. Two methods have been common. The first way is that by which most of the villeins became "free," namely, when men get education or wealth, they make their way one by one into a privileged class. The other way is by the help of the law; for the law tends to break down bounds between classes, to treat all according to a general rule, and to oppose special privileges and monopolies. We shall consider each of these in turn. special liberties to equal rights The value of education in helping a man to gain By freedom was shown especially in the church. The old education idea of "noble" birth was against any change in condition from father to son. In one way, military life By property tended to break down the old barriers and introduce competition, just as the desire of a college for success in athletics leads it to give every man a chance to try for the team, and thus to get teams made up of men with ability rather than merely of men whose brothers were football stars or whose fathers are distinguished men. Still, when one race conquers another the military chiefs themselves are apt to begin a new line of families. So" dukes" are called from " dux," a leader, " counts" from "comites," companions of the king—and the idea of noble blood takes a new lease of life. The conquered race would be regarded as base-born, and its occupations, such as plowing or weaving, as not fit for gentlemen. The church was not controlled by the idea of birth so far as its own ranks were concerned. It took peasant boys or town boys or sons of gentle folk, and if they were bright enough they might aspire to any rank. Funds were established to enable poor boys to study at Oxford and Cambridge. The paths to law and to the service of the king as ministers, judges, or chancellor likewise lay open, for all these officers were "clerks," that is, "clerics." If they could read they could have the "benefit of clergy." The path to freedom by gaining wealth was that followed by many. The Danes, who had much influence in early customs of northeastern England, honored the successful trader and merchant. In the early days of Saxon England a "ceorl" (a member of the lower class) might become a "thegn "if he had five or six hundred acres of land; "and if a merchant throve so that he fared thrice over the wide sea by his own means, then was he thenceforth by thegn-right worthy" (Laws of Wessex, 920 A.D.). Later it was a question of how the villein might become "free," that is, free to leave his native place, and to work for wages instead of giving so many days in the week to his lord. It seems to have been partly a matter of individual bargaining. It was often more profitable to the lord to have the villein" commute " his services by money, that is, pay a certain rent in money instead of working several days in the week. If then the villein could earn good wages he would become free. To get the "freedom of a town," the direct way was to become a merchant and belong to the merchant gild. As most merchants were also "masters" of some craft, this usually meant serving as an apprentice. But the villein who ran away and lived for a year and a day within a free town became in this way free also. It is as true now as ever that the individual who wants to gain real freedom must in some way gain education or property in order to secure opportunities. It may seem that in these ways of gaining freedom and rights-by fighting and bargaining, by gaining education and property-the nation was not of any use. This would be to forget that in the first place the nation has made order possible, has made it possible to have trade and property, and to make contracts, and thus laid the foundation for securing the various liberties. Yet these are, after all, indirect. In modern times the state works more directly for liberty by conducting schools, by affording opportunities through public lands for people to secure homes of their own, by protecting them from accident and disease. The indirect ways came first because, as we have so often noted, the nation was in the first place a band of warriors and cared little for equal rights. But there was one part of the national government By law which from the first was working more directly to make rights equal. This was the system of the king's courts which built up the common law. We are speaking, it is to be kept in mind, of such rights as the right to go and come, to be free from the danger of being seized and placed in some prison, whether of king, or duke, or bishop, and to be safe from having one's property seized. Who would want to do these things, and why? The king might want to put a man in prison to get money from him, or in order to get him out of the way, if he criticised the king's acts. It might be thought that a large body like Parliament would have no grudge against any individual, yet Parliament was quite willing at times to condemn a man unheard by simply passing an "Act of Attainder" against him— a procedure which is forbidden by the Constitution in this country. Why would the judges be any better than the king or Parliament? Some judges have doubtless been as brutal as any king, and we cannot say that they have cared any more for the particular men who have come before them than either king or Parliament. The difference has been that judges adopted the plan of following general rules. One circumstance which may have had some part in the change from decisions based on local customs to decisions based on general rules was that under King Henry II the judges were sent about the kingdom from shire to shire to hear complaints of various sorts. If any one is doing such work as this he almost necessarily begins to follow a general rule. He does not know the different people who come before him, and so is more and more inclined to think of his rules and less and less of the particular case. Add to this that after a time the judges were prepared for their work by reading the decisions that others had made, or even the rules which had come down from the laws of Rome and you have another reason why judges tried to act by rules. But suppose the rules themselves are hard or cruel, Why a will not this make a government by law worse than a government by laws government by kings or town meetings without any is a democratic laws? This is a question to which there are two sides. Why safer? The chief reasons why, on the whole, a government by laws is safer are perhaps two: (a) Laws represent the wisdom of several men, not of one man. One man may sometimes have a better idea than is likely to be adopted by a group and be made law, but ordinarily no one man is likely to think of all the interests to be affected and so his ideas are liable to be one-sided. (b) More important is this: If any rule is followed strictly and impartially in all cases, it is soon perceived whether it is a good rule or a bad one. If it |