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ITS HISTORY, AND THE EFFECTS OF THAT HISTORY.—CONCLUSION.
A volume might seem wanted to say anything worth saying[1] on the History of the English Constitution, and a great and new volume might still be written on it, if a competent writer took it in hand. The subject has never been treated by any one combining the lights of the newest research and the lights of the most matured philosophy. Since the masterly book of Hallam was written, both political thought and historical knowledge have gained much, and we might have a treatise applying our strengthened calculus to our augmented facts. I do not pretend that I could write such a book, but there are a few salient particulars which may be fitly brought together, both because of their past interest and of their present importance.
- ↑ Since the first edition of this book was published several valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light on our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs’ “Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First,” Mr. Freeman’s lecture on “The Growth of the English Constitution,” and the chapter on the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his “History of the Norman Conquest:” but we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and as it is most desirable that we should have.
