by the general mood of his age, an age whose special task and aim seemed to be that of reducing to distinct form the principles which had sprung into a new and vigorous life during the age which preceded it.  As the opening of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders, creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, of rulers such as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers, administrators, framers of laws and institutions.  It was to this class that Edward himself belonged.  He had little of creative genius, of political originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion for order and good government, the faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped.  In the judicial reforms to which so much of his attention was directed he showed himself, if not an “English Justinian,” at any rate a clear-sighted and judicious man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape which has borne the test of five centuries’ experience the institutions of his predecessors.  If the excellence of a statesman’s work is to be measured by its duration and the faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the growth and developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the highest standard of excellence.  Our law courts preserve to this very day the form which he gave them.  Mighty as has been the growth of our Parliament, it has grown on the lines which he laid down.  The great roll of English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the Statutes of Edward.  The routine of the first Henry, the administrative changes which had been imposed on the nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second, were transformed under Edward into a political organization with carefully-defined limits, directed not by the king’s will alone but by the political impulse of the people at large.  His social legislation was based in the same fashion on principles which had already been brought into practical working by Henry the Second.  It was no doubt in great measure owing to this practical sense of its financial and administrative value rather than to any foresight of its political importance that we owe Edward’s organization of our Parliament.  But if the institutions which we commonly associate with his name owe their origin to others, they owe their form and their perpetuity to him.

[Sidenote:  Constitutional Aspect of his Reign]

The king’s English policy, like his English name, was in fact the sign of a new epoch.  England was made.  The long period of national formation had come practically to an end.  With the reign of Edward begins the constitutional England in which we live.  It is not that any chasm separates our history before it from our history after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides the history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitution to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain.