[105] Cf. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, I, Boston, 1865, pp. 502-507; Laboulaye, II, p. 171.
[106] The entire text reproduced in Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 3d ed., I, pp. 134 et seq.
[107] The heading of the bill of rights reads: "A declaration of rights made by the representatives of the good people of Virginia, assembled in full and free convention; which rights do pertain to them and their posterity, as the basis and foundation of government."
CHAPTER IX.
THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND THE TEUTONIC CONCEPTION OF RIGHT.
In conclusion there remains still one question to answer. Why is it that the doctrine of an original right of the individual and of a state compact, arising as far back as the time of the Sophists in the ancient world, further developed in the mediæval theory of Natural Law, and carried on by the currents of the Reformation,—why is it that this doctrine advanced to epoch-making importance for the first time in England and her colonies? And in general, in a thoroughly monarchical state, all of whose institutions are inwardly bound up with royalty and only through royalty can be fully comprehended, how could republican ideas press in and change the structure of the state so completely?
The immediate cause thereof lies clearly before us. The antagonism between the dynasty of the Stuarts, who came from a foreign land and relied upon their divine right, and the English national conceptions of right, and also the religious wars with royalty in England and Scotland, seem to have sufficiently favored the spreading of doctrines which were able to arouse an energetic opposition. Yet similar conditions existed in many a Continental state from the end of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. There, too, arose a strong opposition of the estates to royalty which was striving more and more towards absolutism, fearful religious wars broke out and an extensive literature sought with great energy to establish rights of the people and of the individual over against the rulers. The revolutionary ideas on the continent led it is true in France to regicide, but there was nowhere an attempt made at a reconstruction of the whole state system. Locke's doctrines of a Law of Nature appear to have had no influence at all outside of England. The Continental doctrines of natural law played their important part for the first time at the end of the eighteenth century in the great social transformation of the French Revolution.
It was not without result that England in distinction from the Continent had withstood the influence of the Roman Law. The English legal conceptions have by no means remained untouched by the Roman, but they have not been nearly so deeply influenced by them as the Continental. The public law especially developed upon an essentially Teutonic basis, and the original Teutonic ideas of right have never been overgrown with the later Roman conceptions of the state's omnipotence.
The Teutonic state, however, in distinction from the ancient, so far as the latter is historically known to us, rose from weak beginnings to increasing power. The competence of the Teutonic state was in the beginning very narrow, the individual was greatly restricted by his family and clan, but not by the state. The political life of the Middle Ages found expression rather in associations than in a state which exhibited at first only rudimentary forms.