and among the founders of that political freedom which is enjoyed to-day by all English-speaking people, the name of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, deserves a place in our grateful remembrance beside the names of Cromwell and Washington.  Simon’s great victory at Lewes in 1264 must rank with Naseby and Yorktown.  The work begun by his House of Commons was the same work that has continued to go on without essential interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone.  The fundamental principle of political freedom is “no taxation without representation”; you must not take a farthing of my money without consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it.  Only when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to men.  Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle of “no taxation without representation,” that innermost kernel of the English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly five hundred years afterward.  When we think of these dates, by the way, we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord cannot be done by the listless or the slothful.  So much time and so much strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field of Evesham!  Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the day of peril is yet past.  From kings, indeed, we have no more to fear; they have come to be as spooks and bogies of the nursery.  But the gravest dangers are those which present themselves in new forms, against which people’s minds have not yet been fortified with traditional sentiments and phrases.  The inherited predatory tendency of men to seize upon the fruits of other people’s labour is still very strong, and while we have nothing more to fear from kings, we may yet have trouble enough from commercial monopolies and favoured industries, marching to the polls their hordes of bribed retainers.  Well indeed has it been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  God never meant that in this fair but treacherous world in which He has placed us we should earn our salvation without steadfast labour. [Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty]