uniform, walked into a provincial town of some importance, ordered the first company of soldiers he met to follow him, and then with that retinue, appeared before the town hall and demanded of the mayor the keys of the treasury.  These were surrendered without question and he escaped with the money, representing, of course, that he had orders from the Imperial government.  It never occurred to any one to question a soldier in full uniform, and it was only some days later, when the town accounts were sent to Berlin to be approved, that the robbery was discovered.

Such a thing could by no possibility have happened in England or with us; the town treasurer would at once have demanded his authority, his order from the civil authorities; the uniform would have failed to impress him.  Moreover, under our local self-government, under our decentralized system, nobody is above even a town officer, or a State or city official at the head of his department, however small it be, except the courts.  State officers may not command town officers, nor Federal officers State officers; nor soldiers give orders to policemen.  The president, the governor, may perhaps remove them; but that is all.  And even the policeman acts at his peril, and may be sued in the ordinary courts, if he oversteps his authority.  The notion that a free citizen has a right absolutely to question his constraint by any State officer is peculiar to the English and American people, and this cannot be too often repeated; for it is what foreigners simply fail to understand.  And it rests on this chapter in the Great Charter, originally, as amplified and explained by the courts and later acts of Parliament, such, as the Habeas Corpus Act.  If a man is arrested by any official, that person, however great, has to justify the arrest.  In theory, a man arrested has a right to sue him for damages, and to sue him criminally for trespass; and if that man, be he private individual or be he an official or president, cannot show by a “due course of law”—­that is, by a due lawsuit, tried with a jury—­that he did it under a duly enacted law, and that the facts of the case were such as to place the man under that law—­then that official, however high, is just as much liable in the ordinary courts, as if he were the merest footpad trying to stop a man on the highway—­a doctrine almost unknown to any country in the world outside of England, the United States, and English colonies.

III

RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF ANGLO-SAXON LAW

Going on with the statutes, the next thing we will note is a matter that concerns the personal relations.  It shows again how eagerly our English common law overruled the church law, the canon law.  Although the church under the pope always pretended that it alone had authority to regulate relations between the sexes, marriage and divorce, we found Henry I interfering with the priests themselves, and we now