Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/763

 -1776] Legal training and its results. 731 law. In early colonial days there were few lawyers ; and, at the outset, no locally established customs. Before long, customs began to assert themselves ; in a generation or two, these had become established. The Courts, which gave them the sanction of formal law, were then composed not of trained jurists but of men resembling in general rather the justices of the peace than the judges of England. As a class they were persons of vigorous sense and upright character ; they were confronted with the nominal duty of administering the law of England, and accordingly informed themselves concerning it as well as they could by means of treatises and books of legal forms ; but, in reality, their duty was to establish in their own remote country a legal system which should secure them the rights of life, of property, and, so far as might be, of liberty. Thus there grew up among them a habit of assuming that the practical customs of their country were really based on abstract legal principles, concerning which, now and again, they discoursed and disputed with far more freedom than would have been the case in a country where lawyers and legislators had been specially trained for their careers. From the nature of affairs, any man of position and of intelligence was apt to find himself charged with duties which compelled him, in some degree, to assume the character of a jurist and of a legal thinker ; he might at any moment be called to a position in which he would be expected to assert not only the actual state of the law, but the reasons for it. When we remember that these conditions originated in the reign of Charles I ; when we recall the tendency of England at that time to the assertion of general political principles a tendency never so evident there after the collapse of the Commonwealth ; and when, furthermore, we remind ourselves of the comparative stability of American social conditions, we shall feel less wonder than sometimes arises when we are confronted with the political philosophers of the American Revolution. They were in truth the successors of generations who had been compelled to administer a new system of customary law, and to defend and support it by reference to principles and authorities which had developed under conditions widely different from their own. They had grown so accustomed to the assertion of abstract legal and political principles, derived from their occasional reading and study, that they instinctively welcomed the delusively simple and alluring generalisations of fashionable French philosophy. Yet, all the while, they never dreamed of letting general principles, however fascinating, interfere with the state of legal custom on which the stability of their society depended. They had learned, to a degree which has not been understood, the practical lesson that life cannot be conducted on abstract principles. In practical matters their good sense was remarkable. Yet they never quite understood the actual divergence between their preaching and their practice. At heart, they had an instinctive, uncritical faith in their CH. XXIII.