Nor shall I be going so far as to anticipate what I shall have to lay before you by and by if I say now that I do trace in the old Teutonic system mo… - William Stubbs

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Nor shall I be going so far as to anticipate what I shall have to lay before you by and by if I say now that I do trace in the old Teutonic system more germs of real liberty than I can in the Celtic system, so far as we know it, or in the Sclavonic, or in the Roman itself, with respect, be it said, to all those who find nothing in civilisation that is not Roman. I do think that in the free tenure of land, the fixed obligations of allodialism, the relation of the freeman to history as the impersonation of the race, the combination of the frankpledge, nay, I will add the compurgation and the ordeal and the wergild, is to be found a more likely basis of freedom than in the community of land, the close tie of patriarchal or family unity, the enormous and disproportionate estimate of blood nobility, and the clannish spirit that one finds in the Highland Scot and Irishman, or in the Pole or Hungarian.