[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 172.]

[Sidenote:  Germs of the idea of a written constitution.] [Sidenote:  Our indebtedness to the Romans.] [Sidenote:  Mediaeval charters.] The germs of the written constitution existed a great while ago.  Perhaps it would not be easy to say just when they began to exist.  It was formerly supposed by such profound thinkers as Locke and such persuasive writers as Rousseau, that when the first men came together to live in civil society, they made a sort of contract with one another as to what laws they would have, what beliefs they would entertain, what customs they would sanction, and so forth.  This theory of the Social Contract was once famous, and exerted a notable influence on political history, and it is still interesting in the same way that spinning-wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs are interesting; but we now know that men lived in civil society, with complicated laws and customs and creeds, for many thousand years before the notion had ever entered anybody’s head that things could be regulated by contract.  That notion we owe chiefly to the ancient Romans, and it took them several centuries to comprehend the idea and put it into practice.  We owe them a debt of gratitude for it.  The custom of regulating business and politics and the affairs of life generally by voluntary but binding agreements is something without which we moderns would not think life worth living.  It was after the Roman world—­that is to say, Christendom, for in the Middle Ages the two terms were synonymous—­had become thoroughly familiar with the idea of contract, that the practice grew up of granting written charters to towns, or monasteries, or other corporate bodies.  The charter of a mediaeval town was a kind of written contract by which the town obtained certain specified immunities or privileges from the sovereign or from a great feudal lord, in exchange for some specified service which often took the form of a money payment.  It was common enough for a town to buy liberty for hard cash, just as a man might buy a farm.  The word charter originally meant simply a paper or written document, and it was often applied to deeds for the transfer of real estate.  In contracts of such importance papers or parchment documents were drawn up and carefully preserved as irrefragable evidences of the transaction.  And so, in quite significant phrase the towns zealously guarded their charters as the “title-deeds of their liberties.”

[Sidenote:  The “Great Charter” (1215).] After a while the word charter was applied in England to a particular document which specified certain important concessions forcibly wrung by the people from a most unwilling sovereign.  This document was called Magna Charta, or the “Great Charter,” signed at Runnymede, June 15, 1215, by John, king of England.  After the king had signed it and gone away to his room, he rolled in a mad fury on the floor, screaming curses, and gnawing sticks and straw in