them and in their laws that resulted in representative government, and
in the institution of a legislature, making, as we now would say, the
laws; though a thousand years ago they never said that a legislature
_made_ laws, they only said that it _told what the laws were_. This is
another very important distinction. The "law" of the free Anglo-Saxon
people was regarded as a thing existing by itself, like the sunlight,
or at least as existing like a universally accepted custom observed by
every one. It was five hundred years before the notion crept into the
minds, even of the members of the British Parliaments, that they could
make a _new_ law. What they supposed they did, and what they were
understood by the people to do, was merely to _declare_ the law, as it
was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always
being--and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are,
the more they have that notion--that their free laws and customs were
something which came from the beginning of the world, which they
always held, which were immutable, no more to be changed than the
forces of nature; and that no parliament, under the free Anglo-Saxon
government, or later under the Norman kings, who tried to make them
unfree, no king, could ever _make_ a law, but could only declare what
the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is _jus dare_, and
_jus dicere_. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the Parliament
never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I said, not
only what it was then, but what it had been, as they supposed, for
thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make _new_
laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament. How did it arise?
The English Parliament,[1] as you doubtless know, was the successor,
or grew out of the old Witenagemot, the old Saxon Great Council, and
that Great Council originally--and I am now talking of centuries
before the Conquest--the Witenagemot, included in theory all the free
inhabitants of the realm, just as a modern town meeting does. Mind