constitution, with the consequent relation of the courts to the
law-making power, has gone on entirely upon American soil.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]

[Sidenote: Germs of the idea of a written constitution.]
[Sidenote: Our indebtedness to the Romans.]
[Sidenote: Mediaeval charters.]
The germs of the written constitution existed a great while ago.
Perhaps it would not be easy to say just when they began to exist.
It was formerly supposed by such profound thinkers as Locke and such
persuasive writers as Rousseau, that when the first men came together
to live in civil society, they made a sort of contract with one
another as to what laws they would have, what beliefs they would
entertain, what customs they would sanction, and so forth. This
theory of the Social Contract was once famous, and exerted a notable
influence on political history, and it is still interesting in the
same way that spinning-wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs
are interesting; but we now know that men lived in civil society,
with complicated laws and customs and creeds, for many thousand years
before the notion had ever entered anybody's head that things could
be regulated by contract. That notion we owe chiefly to the ancient
Romans, and it took them several centuries to comprehend the idea and
put it into practice. We owe them a debt of gratitude for it. The
custom of regulating business and politics and the affairs of life
generally by voluntary but binding agreements is something without
which we moderns would not think life worth living. It was after the
Roman world--that is to say, Christendom, for in the Middle Ages the
two terms were synonymous--had become thoroughly familiar with the
idea of contract, that the practice grew up of granting written
charters to towns, or monasteries, or other corporate bodies. The
charter of a mediaeval town was a kind of written contract by which
the town obtained certain specified immunities or privileges from the
sovereign or from a great feudal lord, in exchange for some specified
service which often took the form of a money payment. It was common
enough for a town to buy liberty for hard cash, just as a man might
buy a farm. The word _charter_ originally meant simply a paper or
written document, and it was often applied to deeds for the transfer
of real estate. In contracts of such importance papers or parchment
documents were drawn up and carefully preserved as irrefragable
evidences of