On the English Reform Bill

[p. 89]

|89| pride of the nation in its legislation. As is well known, this legislation rests through and through on particular rights, liberties, privileges, which have been granted, sold, given as presents, or wrested from kings or Parliaments on particular occasions; the Magna Charta, Bill of rights, these most important foundations of the English constitution, which were afterwards further determined by resolutions of Parliament, are concessions extorted by force or gifts of grace, pacts etc., and the rights of the state have remained standing at the private-law form of their origin and thereby at the contingency of their content. This aggregate of positive determinations, unconnected in itself, has not yet undergone the development and transformation which has been carried through in the civilised states of the Continent and in the enjoyment of which, e.g., the German lands have found themselves for a longer or shorter time.

In England the moments have hitherto been lacking which have the chief share in these progresses, as glorious as they are fortunate. Foremost among these moments stands the scientific treatment of right, which on the one hand has applied general foundations to the particular kinds and their complications and carried them through in them, and on the other hand has brought the concrete and the special back to simpler determinations; from this could arise the territorial codes and institutions of public law, predominantly composed according to general principles, of the more recent states of the Continent, in which, in regard to the content of what is just, common human sense and sound reason were permitted to have their due share. For a still more important moment in the reshaping of right is to be named, – the great sense of princes for making such principles as the best of the state, the happiness of their subjects and the general welfare, but above all the feeling of a justice that is in and for itself, the guiding star of their legislative activity,

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