A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom: The Polity of the English-speaking Race. Outlined in Its Inception, Development, Diffusion and Present Condition

Front Cover
C. Scribner's sons, 1890 - Literary Criticism - 420 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 248 - I AB do swear, That I do from my heart, abhor, detest, and abjure as impious and heretical, that damnable doctrine and position, That princes excommunicated or deprived by the pope, or any authority of the see of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their subjects, or any other whatsoever.
Page 245 - Majesty that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by act of Parliament.
Page 249 - Such classes of subjects as are expressly excepted in the enumeration of the classes of subjects by this act assigned exclusively to the legislatures of the provinces.
Page 154 - The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers.
Page 245 - And whereas of late great companies of soldiers and mariners have been dispersed into divers counties of the realm, and the inhabitants against their wills have been compelled to receive them into their houses, and there to suffer them to sojourn, against the laws and customs of this realm and to the great grievance and vexation of the people.
Page 187 - These wards, called townships in New England, are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation.
Page 245 - Whereas the late king James the Second by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.
Page 71 - It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do; good Christians content themselves with his will revealed in his Word; so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do; or to say that a king cannot do this or that; but rest in that which is the king's will revealed in his law.
Page 159 - Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared ; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.
Page xxii - There is no difficulty in showing that the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community ; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general.

Bibliographic information