led to these results, if we briefly glance at the prominent features in
the early history and constitution of the two principal Christian states,
Castile and Aragon, previous to the fifteenth century. [2]

The Visigoths who overran the Peninsula, in the fifth century, brought
with them the same liberal principles of government which distinguished
their Teutonic brethren. Their crown was declared elective by a formal
legislative act. [3] Laws were enacted in the great national councils,
composed of prelates and nobility, and not unfrequently ratified in an
assembly of the people. Their code of jurisprudence, although abounding in
frivolous detail, contained many admirable provisions for the security of
justice; and, in the degree of civil liberty which it accorded to the
Roman inhabitants of the country, far transcended those of most of the
other barbarians of the north. [4] In short, their simple polity exhibited
the germ of some of those institutions, which, with other nations, and
under happier auspices, have formed the basis of a well-regulated
constitutional liberty. [5]

But, while in other countries the principles of a free government were
slowly and gradually unfolded, their development was much accelerated in
Spain by an event, which, at the time, seemed to threaten their total
extinction,--the great Saracen invasion at the beginning of the eighth
century. The religious, as well as the political institutions of the
Arabs, were too dissimilar to those of the conquered nation, to allow the
former to exercise any very sensible influence over the latter in these
particulars. In the Spirit of toleration, which distinguished the early
followers of Mahomet, they conceded to such of the Goths, as were willing
to continue among them after the conquest, the free enjoyment of their
religious, as well as of many of the civil privileges which they possessed
under the ancient monarchy. [6] Under this liberal dispensation it cannot