There are no constitutional revolutions, no violent reversals of legislation; custom is far more potent than law, and custom is modified infinitesima… - William Stubbs

Almost any student who has read the usual books, if he were asked to mark what was the foremost idea of the three centuries that intervene between the year 1500 and the year 1800, would reply that it was the idea of the balance of power. The balance of power, however it be defined, i.e. whatever the powers were between which it was necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle which gives unity to the political plot of modern European history.

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.

We hear of the dead past and the living present: we are bid (and we do well to remember that it is an American poet who so adapts the words) to let the dead past bury its dead. But surely the past lives in the present, the process by which we became what we are is a part of our living being; if we are cut off from what we were, we only half live.