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 that if three Englishmen were shipwrecked on a desert island, their first proceeding would be that one would propose, and another second, that the third do take the chair. I need not follow out all that this implies. But one point deserves notice. The Englishman is content to live under complex and venerable institutions, because he feels that their gradual growth is a guarantee that they were formed through a wish to deal with Englishmen as they are. He thinks that his laws and institutions were made to fit him, and he resents being pared down to fit them. Hence he is restive under simpler systems which are more rigidly applied. Who does not know the travelling Englishman, aggrieved because he may not argue the rights of his particular case, as against some general rule, which the native finds no difficulty in dutifully obeying? His grievance lies in the sense that the rule never contemplated his particular case at all, and yet that he is called upon to obey it. It is this which lies at the bottom of an Englishman's conception of tyranny. His sense of justice is not the same as that of peoples whose law and institutions are more logical, and he labours under a defective sympathy with other institutions than his own.

There is, however, another consequence of the antiquity of our institutions, for which we undeservedly suffer in foreign estimation. We are responsible for having invented a form of government which suits ourselves, and seems simple in its main lines, but which really depends on so much beneath those main lines that it is unfitted for exportation. The methods of our parliamentary government have