Page:Yale Law Journal - Volume 27.pdf/1130

{| width=100% cellpadding=5 border=0 forces of revolution and reform, liberals everywhere looked to England as the exemplar of political liberty, and in many cases frankly borrowed her institutions. Wherever the representative legislature and responsible government and guaranties of individual liberty exist to-day, there is indebtedness to England, and this is as true of countries that are republican in form as of those that are monarchical. But no country outside of the British Empire is so peculiarly and palpably English in its laws and institutions as our own. All of what is fundamental in our political system—the supremacy of law over the government, the representative system, individual liberty, the sovereignty of the people—is derived institutionally from England and from nowhere else, a fact which the relatively superficial differences between a republic and a constitutional monarchy should not be permitted to obscure. With us, however, there has been no importation of an alien system; the process has been one of inheritance and adaptation. The thread of Anglo-American institutional history was not cut by the American Revolution. Indeed the principles of government and liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence were as truly English as the language in which they were expressed, and a people that cherishes this document as its birth certificate can never view the winning of English liberty as an alien theme.
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 * } inevitably the laws and institutions of the home land. The second is the copying, more or less conscious, by alien peoples of the English constitution. When the absolute monarchies of the continent of Europe were falling before the

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