Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/308

. All the difference is that his historical recollection is better than theirs. Things that they regard as sacred by reason of their antiquity, he knows to be of comparative!}' modern origin. In a note to "The Growth of the English Constitution," he makes the following manly declaration with regard to the monarchical superstition which is so sedulously fostered in this country: "There really seems no reason why the form of the executive government should not be held as lawful a subject for discussion as the House of Lords, the Established Church, the standing army, or any thing else. It shows simple ignorance, if it does not show something worse, when the word 'republican' is used as synonymous with cut-throat or pickpocket. I do not find that in republican countries this kind of language is applied to the admirers of monarchy; but the people who talk in this way are just those who have no knowledge of republics, either in past history or in present times. They may very likely have climbed a Swiss mountain; but they have taken care not to ask what was the constitution of the country at its foot."

Edward Augustus Freeman was born at Harborne, in the neighborhood of Birmingham, in 1823. He unfortunately lost both parents before he was one year old; his father, John Freeman, Esq., of Pedmore Hall, Worcestershire, dying at the comparatively early age of forty. His paternal grandmother, who resided at Northampton, became his guardian, and with her he had his home till his removal to Oxford in 1841. Before proceeding to the university, he had attended for several years a school at Cheam, Surrey; a private tutor, the Rev. Mr. Gutch, subsequently preparing him for matriculation at Trinity College. There his great