The tendency is towards an increase in the presentative element, as is evidenced by growing popular control. Not only our laws but our forms of government show this. The Pan-Angle notion of an executive at the time the first colonies were forming was drawn from a kingship which then meant a permanent tenure of office. The president of the United States who holds office for a fixed length of time was created after that model. He represents, but once elected cannot be recalled.[62-1] In the British Isles changes have come about, and the prime minister who now wields executive power can be recalled any day by the people speaking indirectly through their representatives, popular opinion swaying his party adherents to relinquish their efforts in his support.[62-1] In this respect the British Isles organization has proved more sensitive than the American to the spirit of the times.[62-2]
In our governments various individuals and classes, or what would in modern days be called "interests," struggle for supremacy. When a minority is successful we dub it aristocracy or privilege. At one time the king was the privileged minority. In 1215 the barons attacked the {63} privilege of this minority; the king asked to have the matter arbitrated by a third party. The barons, who apparently understood something about arbitration, refused. They also refused to give any assurance of their own good behaviour; Magna Carta was a check on the king only. Moreover "Magna Carta can hardly be said to have introduced any new ideas. As Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law) say 'on the whole the charter contains little that is absolutely new. It is restorative.'" [63-1] Since then many aristocrats have enjoyed special privileges: certain churches, certain forms of industry, holders of certain kinds of property. Against all these in turn the levelling force of democracy has been hurled. It can be said in general that we are travelling, though with a wise conservatism, away from the aristocratic to the democratic, by which is meant that privileges are becoming more seldom to the few and power more usual to the many. Democracy, it seems likely, is to be our common future. But, in the meanwhile, the present stage of all our governments may truly be said to be representative action with presentative sanction.
Allied to the question of government is that of suffrage. While all are subject to the government {64} of the land, only some take active part in determining what it shall be. And here, again, the individualism of the Pan-Angles is an insistent factor. Voters, whether so presentatively or representatively, have been in our past one of the privileged minorities—all individuals reckoned. They are so still. But by constantly receiving into their ranks bodies of newly enfranchised persons, they bid fair to become the majority. Social, religious, property, and educational disqualifications long kept many men from the suffrage. Many of these disabilities have been abandoned, some in all places, others in some places only. Sex alone has kept many from voting. This disqualification has been in places and in some respects removed. Whatever one may believe as to the wisdom of entrusting the ballot to the few or to the many, it has long seemed evident that the race was advancing toward universal adult male suffrage. Now many would say instead that the goal is universal adult suffrage.
On our respective paths toward this goal our various electoral units mark various stages of progress. Identical voting qualifications may be found half a world apart, while neighbouring groups differ. No two probably agree in every slight detail, though the range of dissimilarity is narrow. Certain property and educational tests are not infrequent, especially in the older Pan-Angle organizations. The newer ones, as a rule, are the more democratic. Women hold suffrage privileges in at least some respects very extensively, the newer communities again being more liberal in this. Plural voting obtains in the British Isles. {65} These local differences produce no confusion, but keep our progress orderly.
Of the United States it has been said, "There is a great advantage in having different State governments try different experiments in the enactment of laws and in governmental policies, so that a State less prone to accept novel and untried remedies may await their development by States more enterprising and more courageous. The end is that the diversity of opinion in State governments enforces a wise deliberation and creates a locus poenitentiae which may constitute the salvation of the Republic."[65-1] Equally might this have been stated of the effect of the diversity of opinion in the Pan-Angle units on the progress of the whole civilization.
In no regard more than in the question of suffrage, is seen the value and need of local option. It permits progress in whatever respect progress is possible, and prevents the misfortunes that accompany attempts to force progress where the time and conditions are not ripe for it. Through the exercise of local option the suffrage has been constantly extended, a bit here and a bit there, throughout Pan-Angle countries without seriously affecting our political stability. Any attendant shock is confined within narrow boundaries.[65-2] If Texas and Vermont, Tasmania and South Australia, Transvaal and Cape Province have different suffrage {66} requirements, it is because they differ in history and composition and hence in needs. The desires of their inhabitants could not be satisfied by a single law. To seek to establish one would be to estrange all and satisfy none.
The question of negro suffrage is in point. The northern states of America, where the negroes were comparatively few and were to some degree at least educated, felt favourably toward negro suffrage. After the Civil War the northern voters, acting through the central government, were able to give the vote to the negro, not only within their own borders but throughout the country. The results were most unfortunate. The Pan-Angle population of the southern states thereby lost their local autonomy. The men most fit to govern in these states were forced in self-defence to become law-breakers. It took many years to undo the mistake and re-establish there the will of the Pan-Angle community. Through the intelligence of the South in framing legislation, and the forbearance of the North in not overriding this legislation, it is now adequately accomplished. "Hitherto, no amount of legal ingenuity has sufficed to extract from the United States supreme court a direct, straightforward decision on the constitutionality of the 'grandfather' clauses in the election laws of many states, whereby the Negro voters have been disfranchised. The court has invariably disposed of cases designed to test the constitutionality of such laws on technical grounds."[66-1] South Africa, when the subject arose in Constitutional Convention, {67} was wiser. No part overruled another part. "In respect of the admission, of natives to the parliamentary franchise the practice of the Cape Colony was in direct conflict with that of the remaining colonies. As no agreement on the question of the admission or non-admission of natives to the Union franchise could be reached, the Convention decided that the franchise qualifications existing in the several colonies should stand as the franchise qualifications for the Union Parliament in the respective provinces of the Union. As the result of this compromise, while the native voters in the Cape Province obtained the Union franchise, practically no natives were admitted to this privilege in the remaining three provinces."[67-1] With certain temporary limitations, provision is made for the elimination of the vote of the coloured inhabitants of Cape Province.[67-2] It is now generally acknowledged that no community of Pan-Angles is to be forced to accept as voters those whom it considers non-assimilable.
Our law, like our language, has flowed from many sources and has been subjected to foreign influence. The colonists carried out with them the English common law, the sources of which "have been stated to be 'as undiscoverable as those of the Nile.'"[67-3] Quite different from this is the common law of Scotland, "based on the principles {68} of the Roman Civil and Canon law as applied and modified by a long series of statutes of the Scots Parliament and decisions of the Scottish courts. . . . A detailed comparison of the differences between the private law of England and Scotland would involve a survey of the whole domain of jurisprudence and would be the work of a lifetime;"[68-1] From 1642 to 1652 occurred the English Civil War, followed by the Commonwealth. In those stormy years which seem, as writes an Australian jurist, "to have anticipated almost every effort of modern political thought, scarcely any cry was more persistently raised by the reform party than the cry for reform of the law. It was the first great period of conscious law reform."[68-2] All the Pan-Angle nations, save only the British Isles and Newfoundland, had the stress of that period reflected in the history of their settlements, or were founded after the results of that war had been produced.
In the new countries the legal influence was predominantly British, but in some parts the colonists encountered communities of Europeans of other civilizations and of other legal theories. In Quebec and Louisiana they met French law; in western United States, Spanish; and in South Africa, a form of Roman-Dutch. Being elements in civilizations which only gradually have blended into that of the Pan-Angles, these laws have in greater or less measure survived. But in such {69} localities slowly the foreign law merges into that of the local Pan-Angles. As an example we have South Africa: "The local Dutch statute law was abandoned perforce as obsolescent, and replaced almost entirely by local enactments based upon the existing circumstances of the colony or founded upon English statutes, and the Roman-Dutch common law, broadly speaking, came to be administered concurrently with English common law. Nor was it surprising that, with judges and advocates alike versed in the decisions and practice of the English Courts, English principles were more and more closely woven into the fabric of the Colonial law. And apart from the influence of the 'case-law,' thus built up through the Colonial Reports, circumstances—or rather its greater capacity to satisfy the conditions of modern life—gave the regulation of the field of commercial intercourse almost exclusively to English law."[69-1] A like story might be told of French law in Louisiana. In other instances, where perhaps it receives no official recognition, non-English law has doubtless had its effect on what may be loosely called Pan-Angle law. As long as it suits the people and their needs better, so long a law exists regardless of its origin. But experience shows that the law of any Pan-Angle nation tends to conform to the practices of our whole civilization.
Because the English common law forms so large an element, and because it has among us been modified only by English-speaking people, the Pan-Angle law, though drawn from many sources, {70} still presents a certain homogeneity. "An English barrister . . . when once he enters an American court, or begins debating legal questions with American lawyers, . . . knows that he is not abroad, but at home; he breathes again the legal atmosphere to which he is accustomed. The law of America, he finds, is the law of England carried across the Atlantic, and little changed even in form. In all legal matters it is the conservatism, not the changeableness, of Americans which astonishes an English observer. Old names and old formulas meet us in every law court. Some twenty-six years ago there were to be found in Chicago in daily use forms of pleading which had long become obsolete in England."[70-1]