laws is an entirely modern conception of Parliament. How did it arise?
The English Parliament,[1] as you doubtless know, was the successor,
or grew out of the old Witenagemot, the old Saxon Great Council, and
that Great Council originally--and I am now talking of centuries
before the Conquest--the Witenagemot, included in theory all the free
inhabitants of the realm, just as a modern town meeting does. Mind
you, they were then tribes, living in "Hundreds." They were not
nations, not even states and counties, and in early times it probably
was possible to have a popular assembly which should include at least
all the warriors, all the fighting men, and consequently all the men
whose votes counted. No man who could not fight could share in the
government--an historical fact which our suffragists tend to ignore
when they talk of "rights." The Witenagemot, undoubtedly, was
originally a universal assembly of the tribe in question. But as
the tribes got amalgamated, were associated together, or at least
localized instead of wandering about, and particularly when they got
localized in England--where before they had been but a roaming people
on account of their struggles with the Britons--the necessity of
greater organization probably became obvious to them at once, and the
Witenagemot readily assumed a somewhat more formal form; and that
resulted in representation. For we are talking of early England;
that is, of the eastern half of what is now England, the Saxon part;
obviously you couldn't put all the members even of East Anglia in one
hall or in one field to discuss laws, so they invented representation.
All the authorities appear to be agreed that there is no prototype
for what seems to us such a very simple thing as representation,
representative government, among the Greeks or the Romans, or any
of the older civilizations of which we have knowledge. It is very
surprising that it is so, and I am always expecting that some one will
discover, either in the Achaian League or somewhere, that it is not
so, that there is a prototype; but there doesn't seem to be any
regular system of representative government until you get to
Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that was the second stage of the Witenagemot,
and then it properly begins to be called the Great Assembly or
Council of the people. This representative assembly was then not only
legislative, it was also executive, to some extent, and entirely
judicial; for we are a thousand years b