[Sidenote: Political ideas.]

Certain fundamental political ideas were common to the older and the
younger branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, and have remained common to this
day. The first was the idea of the supremacy of law, the conception that a
statute was binding on the subject, on the members of the legislative
body, and even on the sovereign. The people on both sides of the water
were accustomed to an orderly government, in which laws were made and
administered with regularity and dignity. The next force was the
conception of an unwritten law, of the binding power of custom. This idea,
although by no means peculiar to the English race, had been developed into
an elaborate "common law,"--a system of legal principles accepted as
binding on subject and on prince, even without a positive statute. Out of
these two underlying principles of law had gradually developed a third
principle, destined to be of incalculable force in modern governments,--
the conception of a superior law, higher even than the law-making body. In
England there was no written constitution, but there was a succession of
grants or charters, in which certain rights were assured to the
individual. The long struggle with the Stuart dynasty in the seventeenth
century was an assertion of these rights as against the Crown. In the
colonies during the same time those rights were asserted against all
comers,--against the colonial governors, against the sovereign, and
against Parliament. The original colonies were almost all founded on
charters, specific grants which gave them territory and directed in what
manner they should carry on government therein. These charters were held
by the colonists to be irrevocable except for cause shown to the
satisfaction of a court of law; and it was a recognized right of the
individual to plead that a colonial law was void because contrary to the
charter. Most of the grants had lapsed or had been forcibly, and even
illegally, annulled; but the principle still remained that a law was