The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People

by John R. Dos Passos

With the American appropriation and assimilation of these inherited political ideas, there exists language, literature, and all the rest of the kindred sympathies, making a tie stronger than blood, and culminating in the grand conception of federation developed into government, i.e., the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Gladstone unites the view of the English and American Constitutions in the oft-quoted words ''as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."

Who should acknowledge the value of all this, and the sacrifices which it has cost England, if not we, who have inherited it, fed upon it, grown upon it, and to-day livingly embody and exemplify it?

Is not sympathy and brotherhood between the two peoples, the natural, necessary, and inevitable outcome? "Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder."

VI.—THE SAME LAWS, LEGAL CUSTOMS, AND GENERAL MODES OF JUDICIAL PROCEDURE

Closely allied to, if not a part of their political institutions, comes another natural feature of the alliance, an element more powerful than steel to rivet the bonds between the two nations, i.e., the {134} same laws, customs, and general modes of legal procedure.

The phenomenal and colossal development of North America is somewhat explained by the fact that we were not compelled to create or originate our political institutions, laws, or judicial modes of procedure; these were all ready for us when we commenced the business of an independent government. The materials were at hand with which we were to build the grand structure of democracy. Whatever difficulty was experienced in the design, whatever time was spent in the building, was attributable to the jealousies, fears and anxieties of the delegates who represented the thirteen original independent States in the Constitutional Convention. The great and almost insurmountable barrier to the creation of the Republic arose out of an inability to agree to a common basis of association on becoming members of the same family, and surrendering the independent and supreme rights of sovereignty which each of the contracting parties possessed. As colonies we knew no law but the common law; we profited by its utility; we imbibed its teachings; no study was more general among the people. After the Union had become a fait accompli, in most of the States it was solemnly adjudged to remain in force. A new field, corresponding to the growth and importance of the country, was opened to its influence, both here and in England. The two countries now mutually profit by each other in this respect, finding a never-failing source of legal illumination, not only in their judicial {135} precedents and statutory enactments, but in the many admirable text-books—critical, expository and historical, which deal with almost every conceivable subject of private or public rights and duties, in all their practical and ethical relations. Thus that mighty instrumentality, the Law, remains substantially the same in both countries.

We fought the battles of the Revolution to become an independent nation, but when we were free we established New England; we voluntarily adopted every important principle of public and private jurisprudence of the Mother country, and clothed ourselves anew with her legal and judicial garments. The materials of which our governmental house was built, the legal furniture which was used in its embellishment and decoration, we took from the well-stored warehouse of English institutions, and Gladstone's eulogy, which I have quoted above, is no less deserved because the builders of this new government assimilated the architecture and appropriated the materials of existing political institutions and legal principles to their new structure.

But we would be a strange people—wholly careless of history, utterly indifferent to our own political genealogy, if we did not realise and appreciate this splendid record which England had been making through bloody sacrifices and internal struggles for more than twelve centuries—from the reign of Alfred the Great to that of William III., the fruits of which were so fully utilised and enjoyed by us in the establishment of {136} our government. I am not stopping to coin eulogies. I am simply pointing out the facts—facts of supreme importance, but which from their very obviousness have been too easily lost sight of.

But it is just to remark in this connection, that the framers of our Constitution did not blindly, heedlessly, and mechanically copy the English models. Every principle was submitted to the test of severe and analytical argument, every plank that entered into the construction of the Ship of State was thoroughly examined and shown to be sound before it was put into its appropriate place. As the artists and architects model from the works of Angelo and Raphael so the men who fashioned our organic law intelligently studied, assimilated, and applied the principles of the English Constitution to our own government. They showed an artistic, profound, and delicate exercise of judgment, an almost divine perception of the purposes and necessities of the people in the selection of the materials for the laws of the country. These necessities were found to be fully provided for in the legal archives of the old government, which we were simply expanding.