| BOOK REVIEWS | 1103 |
or as we should say today the government, must obey them; and second that, if the government refuses to obey these laws, the nation has the right to force it to do so, even to the point of overthrowing the government and putting another in its place." Magna Carta does not indeed contain any formal statement of the right of deposition, though it legalizes temporary insurrection if the king will not obey the law, but Mr. Adams insists that the right was logically involved in it, and that the principle upon which the nation acted in the political revolutions that followed, in z327, x399 and i689, is to be found in its famous sixty-first clause. With the rapid decline of feudalism as a political system in the thirteenth century, and the beginnings of a national organization of the state, the earlier idea of a feudal contract between king and barons broadened out into the conception of a contract between king and nation. After the period of the Lancastrian government, which, Mr. Adams tells us, was almost modern in form, came a reaction to practical despotism under the Tudors, a despotism which the Stuarts strove to provide with a theoretical and philosophical justification. But divine right and royal absolutism were finally swept from the field by the revolutions of the seventeenth century which assured the triumph of the fundamental principle of the constitution, the subjection of the government, to the law. The growth of the cabinet as an institution of government, together with the extension of the franchise and the restriction of the powers of the House of Lords, has made possible the existence of a democratic republic under the forms of a monarchy. Such in baldest outline is Mr. Adams' interpretation of English constitutional history. It may be noted in passing that the use of the word "nation," without qualification, to describe the body politic of England in times prior to the nineteenth century, is likely to cause misapprehension in the minds of readers who have not acquired the habit of thinking historically. They might, for example, infer from what Mr. Adams says that it was the people who effected the Revolution of 1399. But in reality the Parliament which deposed Richard II was the same institution that had done its utmost to suppress the most genuinely popular movement of the middle ages, the Peasant Revolt of 138r; it was quite as vigorously opposed to the "people" as to a despotic king. Mr. Adams' interpretation is, as he would probably be the first to admit, purely institutional, and as such it cannot fully explain the English constitution or the limited monarchy. For, as he has himself said elsewhere, there are two sets of causes in all institutional history. There are environmental conditions which make new institutions necessary, and there are old institutions upon which these conditions act to transform them into new institutions. Expressing the same fact in another way, we may say that there are two factors in the production of every crop of institutions, soil and seed, and both are necessary. An acorn dropped in the desert does not grow into an oak. Granted that the contract idea of feudalism is the germ whence has sprung the English limited monarchy, it does not of itself afford a sufficient explanation of the limited monarchy. There was the same idea in French feudalism, but the French monarchy became absolute, not limited. The soil, the environmental conditions, which enabled a conception common to all feudal relationships to grow in England alone into limited monarchy, with all that is implied in that term, lies outside the realm of institutional history proper. Mr. Adams rightly emphasizes the ecumenic character of the English constitution. Too often we allow ourselves to think of it as a system peculiar to England. In reality it belongs, in varying degrees, to almost every modem people either by inheritance or through adoption. Two facts explain the spread of English political institutions throughout the world. The first is the spread of the English race by colonization, carrying with it naturally and
