limiting power.

Of these the most fundamental is the preservation in our Constitution of
the Anglo-Saxon idea of individual liberty. The republics of Greece and
Rome had no such conception. All political ideas necessarily concern man as
a social animal, as a member of society--a member of the state. The ancient
republics, however, put the state first and regarded the individual only as
a member of the state. They had in view the public rights of the state in
which all its members shared, and the rights of the members as parts of the
whole, but they did not think of individuals as having rights independent
of the state, or against the state. They never escaped from the attitude
towards public and individual civil rights, which was dictated by the
original and ever-present necessity of military organization and defense.

The Anglo-Saxon idea, on the other hand, looked first to the individual.
In the early days of English history, without theorizing much upon the
subject, the Anglo-Saxons began to work out their political institutions
along the line expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the
individual citizen has certain inalienable rights--the right to life, to
liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, and that government is not the source
of these rights, but is the instrument for the preservation and promotion
of them. So when a century and a half after the conquest the barons of
England set themselves to limit the power of the Crown they did not demand
a grant of rights. They asserted the rights of individual freedom and
demanded observance of them, and they laid the corner-stone of our system
of government in this solemn pledge of the Great Charter:

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseized of his free
hold, or his liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled,
or otherwise destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by