vention that is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon people.

And there is another invention--if we can call it one--to my mind of
far greater importance, which I should urge was also peculiar to the
Anglo-Saxon people; that is, the invention or the idea of personal
liberty; which is understood, and always has been understood, by
Anglo-Saxons in a sense in which it never existed before, so far as I
know, in any people in the history of the world. It is that notion of
personal liberty which was the cause of representative government, not
representative government that was the cause of personal liberty. In
other words, the people did not get up a parliament for the sake of
having that parliament enact laws securing personal liberty. It was
the result of a condition of personal liberty which prevailed among
them and in their laws that resulted in representative government, and
in the institution of a legislature, making, as we now would say, the
laws; though a thousand years ago they never said that a legislature
_made_ laws, they only said that it _told what the laws were_. This is
another very important distinction. The "law" of the free Anglo-Saxon
people was regarded as a thing existing by itself, like the sunlight,
or at least as existing like a universally accepted custom observed by
every one. It was five hundred years before the notion crept into the
minds, even of the members of the British Parliaments, that they could
make a _new_ law. What they supposed they did, and what they were
understood by the people to do, was merely to _declare_ the law, as it
was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always
being--and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are,
the more they have that notion--that their free laws and customs were
something which came from the beginning of the world, which they
always held, which were immutable, no more to be changed than the
forces of nature; and that no parliament, under the free Anglo-Saxon
government, or later under the Norman kings, who tried to make them
unfree, no king, could ever _make_ a law, but could only declare what
the law was. The Latin phrase for that distinction is _jus dare_, and
_jus dicere_. In early England, in Anglo-Saxon times, the Parliament
never did anything but tell what the law was; and, as I said, not
only what it was then, but what it had been, as they supposed, for
thousands of years before. The notion of a legislature to make _new_