Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as it’s origin.

For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.

A stranger to the spirit of the law as it was evolved through centuries in England will always find its history a curious one. Looking first at the early English Common Law, its most striking feature is the enormous extent to which its founders concerned themselves with remedies before settling the substantive rules for breach of which the remedies were required. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in the law of ancient Rome, do we see such a spectacle of legal writs making legal rights.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil?
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The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.

England is great in the esteem to which it upholds the law, contrary to that popular proverb "perfida Albion," which is now proved wrong.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds.

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied.

With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws — for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience — cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . .

We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race.

Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our opposition to such offenses is rooted in religion, then are restraints upon murder and rape unconstitutional?

We arrive at such absurdities if we attempt to erect a wall of separation between the operation of the laws and those Christian moral convictions that move most Americans. If we are to try to sustain some connection between Christian teaching and the laws of this land of ours, we must understand the character of that link. We must claim neither too much nor too little for the influence of Christian belief upon our structur

England alone has a history in which ancient freedom has made its way through, and utilised all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty.

A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.

England, although less homogeneous in blood and character, is more so in uniform and progressive growth. The very diversity of the elements which are united within the isle of Britain serves to illustrate the strength and vitality of that one which for thirteen hundred years has maintained its position either unrivalled or in victorious supremacy. If its history is not the perfectly pure development of Germanic principles, it is the nearest existing approach to such a development. England gained its sense of unity centuries before Germany: it developed its genius for government under influences more purely indigenous: spared from the curse of the imperial system and the Mezentian union with Italy, and escaping thus the practical abeyance of legislation and judicature, it developed its own common law free from the absolutist tendencies of Roman jurisprudence; and it grew equably, harmoniously, not merely by virtue of local effort and personal privilege.