legislatures, or
the inconstant majority of the electorate, were freed from all
constitutional limitations or from the check of an independent
judiciary.

Though Great Britain, our mother country, has no written constitution
and no judiciary empowered to enforce its limitations, it is the happy
possessor of a practically homogeneous people of the Anglo-Saxon race,
little affected by immigration, and imbued for centuries with a deep
regard for personal liberty and private rights. Yet, even there today,
statutes are demanded and sometimes enacted in derogation of them. In
this country the population as the result of great immigration is more
heterogeneous. It comprises races and peoples of diverse temperaments,
of diverse experiences, of diverse traditions, many unschooled in
self-government and lacking in that traditional reverence for liberty
and order so characteristic of the Teutonic races. We even find some
classes openly declaring that if they can get possession of the
government they will exploit the rest of the people for their own
benefit. They essay also to bargain their votes for special
legislation in their favor at the expense of the people at large and
without regard to the principles of equality of right.

With such a population with its universal suffrage, were it not for
our written constitutions with their Bills of Rights and with an
independent judiciary to guard them, there would be no security here
for personal liberty and rights. We should be in the condition of the
people of France as depicted by Wm. S. Lilly in his recent book, "The
New France." He wrote: "It is now more than a century since the
principles of 1789 were formulated there. But in no country, not even
in Russia, is individual freedom less. The state is as ubiquitous and
as autocratic as under the worst Bourbon or Oriental despots. Nowhere
is its hand so heavy upon the subject in every department of human
life. Nowhere is the negation of the value and of the rights of
personal independence more absolute, more complete, and more
effective." Yet France is a republic with manhood suffrage and with an
elective legislature. But its courts are not vested with any power to
conserve any rights of the people against legislative caprice.

CONCLUSION

The thesis I have endeavored to support in these lectures, so far as I
have a thesis, is this: (1) that, after all, human justice consists in
securing to each individual as much liberty of act