Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History ...

for this investigation are clothed in the repulsive form of Medieval Latin is a very poor reason for their being neglected. It may conceivably be questioned whether the modicum of Ciceronian Latin that is acquired by our students in general does in all respects compensate for the loss they sustain in being carefully restrained from contact with a language which the whole civilized world used for the thousand years whose history bears most directly on our own. Why should not the key of knowledge, forged of the finest metal, polished and wrought into the most elaborate perfection as it may be, be strong enough and practicable enough to unlock the hoards of the most fruitful ages?

I have pointed out in the introductory chapter my reasons for not going further than the reign of Edward I. The later history is rather a history of politics than of polity, and has to be illustrated by a very different sort of documents. A more consistent supplement or companion to this volume would be a comparative assortment of corresponding Origines of the other constitutions of Europe. This is a branch of study without which the student cannot fully realize either the peculiar characteristics of his own national polity, or the deep and wide basis which it has in common with those of the modern nations of the Continent. To have furnished however in this volume, even the bare texts of the chief constitutional monuments of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia, would have obliged me to alter the plan altogether; nor could the comparative Constitutional History of Europe be illustrated at all thoroughly on the same scale.

For the present, I commend this little book to the good offices of teachers, and to the tender mercies of pupils, in the firm conviction that the subject it illustrates is of the first educational importance, and in the hope that the plan and line of study which it suggests will be found well calculated to draw out the mind, and to extend the area of sound teaching.

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