Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/235

 the faction of to-day might set up, the faction of to-morrow might pull down: the exiles of to-day were the governors of to-morrow, the forfeitures of to-day only the reprisals of the forfeitures of yesterday. In England it is very different. Here the rights struggled for are historical rights, and the liberties secured are historical liberties. Step by step, from precedent to precedent, the national growth asserts itself, and the kings, yielding their consent, recognise the justice of the claim, or, exchanging resistance for sympathy, throw new but still historical energies into the common growth. We have in the medieval growth of our constitution little to be ashamed of; little of conspiracy, little of fanaticism, little—as little as there can be in the essential character of a politician—of self-seeking. There is enough of the idea of liberty and sound government to lift the struggle out of the region of mere legal resistance to mere legal oppression: there is a growth towards liberty in all the vindication of even class rights and special privileges: a growth towards liberty so spontaneous, I had almost said so little self-conscious, as to show that it is a natural, not a factitious growth: it is not taught by philosophers, it is not extorted by agitators, it is the outgrowth of law and a law-abiding spirit, tending by its very nature to freedom and order conjointly. The transition from medieval to modern history is in this department of national life not an abrupt transition, but a growth befitting a land of settled government;