ctrines of natural law played their important part for the
first time at the end of the eighteenth century in the great social
transformation of the French Revolution.

It was not without result that England in distinction from the Continent
had withstood the influence of the Roman Law. The English legal
conceptions have by no means remained untouched by the Roman, but they
have not been nearly so deeply influenced by them as the Continental.
The public law especially developed upon an essentially Teutonic basis,
and the original Teutonic ideas of right have never been overgrown with
the later Roman conceptions of the state's omnipotence.

The Teutonic state, however, in distinction from the ancient, so far as
the latter is historically known to us, rose from weak beginnings to
increasing power. The competence of the Teutonic state was in the
beginning very narrow, the individual was greatly restricted by his
family and clan, but not by the state. The political life of the Middle
Ages found expression rather in associations than in a state which
exhibited at first only rudimentary forms.

At the beginning of modern times the power of the state became more and
more concentrated. This could happen in England all the easier because
the Norman kings had already strongly centralized the administration.
As early as the end of the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Smith could
speak of the unrestricted power of the English Parliament,[108] which
Coke a little later declared to be "absolute and transcendent".[109]

But this power was thought of by Englishmen as unlimited only in a
nominal legal sense. That the state, and therefore Parliament and the
King have very real restrictions placed upon them has been at all times
in England a live conviction of the people.

Magna Charta declares that the liberties and rights conceded by it are
granted "_in perpetuum_".[110] In the Bill of Rights it was ordained
that everything therein contained should "remain the law of this realm
forever".[111] In spite of the nominal omnipotence of the state a limit
which it shall not over-step is specifically demanded and recognized in
the most important fundamental laws.

In these nominally legal but perfectly meaningless stipulations, the old
Teutonic legal conception of the state's limited sphere of activity
finds expression.

The movement of the Reformation was also based on the idea of the
restriction of the state. Here, however, there entered t