Excerpt from A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom In this book an effort has been made to compress a sketch of constitutional history for a period of nearly two thousand years, - from the time of the Teutons of Caesar and Tacitus to the British Empire and the United States of 1890. It is not the polity of any single people that is outlined, but that of the English-speaking race, that body to-day perhaps one hundred and twenty millions strong, scattered in several nationalities actual or incipient, which upon all the continents and all the great islands of the world, stands now so in the foreground of attention. It is a polity one and the same in its essence in England, in the United States, in Australia, in Canada: one and the same in its essence, moreover, as viewed in the institutions of to-day and in those of the North Germans of the time of Christ. As Sir Francis Pal-grave says: "The new building has been raised upon the old groundwork; the institutions of one age have always been modelled and formed from those of the preceding, and the lineal descent has never been interrupted or disturbed." Anglo-Saxon freedom is most simply and comprehensively stated in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."