Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/303

 chapter than that with which Freeman's "Growth of the English Constitution" opens: "Year by year, on certain spots among the dales and mountain-sides of Switzerland, the traveller who is daring enough to wander out of beaten tracks, and to make his journey at unusual seasons, may look on a sight such as no other corner of the earth can any longer set before him. He may there gaze and feel what none can feel but those who have seen with their own eyes, what none can feel in its fulness but once in a lifetime,—the thrill of looking for the first time face to face on freedom in its purest and most ancient form. He is there in a land where the oldest institutions of our race—institutions which may be traced up to the earliest times of which history or legend gives us any glimmering—still live on in their primeval freshness. He is in a land where an immemorial freedom—a freedom only less eternal than the rocks that guard it—puts to shame the boasted antiquity of kingly dynasties, which by its side seem but as innovations of yesterday. There year by year, on some bright morning of the springtide, the sovereign people, not intrusting its rights to a few of its own numbers, but discharging them itself in the majesty of its own corporate person, meets in the open marketplace or in the green meadow at the mountain's foot to frame the laws to which it yields obedience as its own work, to choose the rulers whom it can afford to greet with reverence as drawing their commission from itself. Such a sight there are but few Englishmen who have seen. To be among those few I reckon among the highest privileges of my life.

"Let me ask you to follow me in spirit to the very home and birthplace of freedom, to the land where we