_Virginians_, gave us in fiction the finest picture of our colonial
life, and the late and deeply lamented Lord Bryce wrote one of the best
commentaries upon our institutions in _The American Commonwealth_. In
more recent years two of the most moving portraits of our Hamilton and
Lincoln are due to your Mr. Oliver and Lord Charnwood. We gratefully
recognize this; and yet, how many educated Englishmen have studied that
little known chapter of our history, which gave to the progress of
mankind a contribution to political science which your Gladstone praised
as the greatest "ever struck off at a given time by the brain and
purpose of man"? If "peace hath her victories no less renown'd than
war," this achievement may well justify your study and awaken your
admiration; for, as I have already said and cannot too strongly
emphasize, it was the work of the English-speaking race, of men who,
shortly before they entered upon this great work of constructive
statecraft, were citizens of your Empire. The conditions of colonial
development had profoundly stimulated in these English pioneers the
sense and genius for constitutionalism.

In his speech on Conciliation with America of March 22, 1775, Edmund
Burke showed his characteristically philosophic comprehension of this
powerful constitutional conscience of the then American subjects of the
Empire. After stating that in no other country in the world was law so
generally studied, and referring to the fact that as many copies of
Blackstone's Commentaries had been sold in America as in England, he
added:

"This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in
attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries the
people, more simple and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill
principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they