Maitland once observed that, in the Middle Ages, “Law was the point where life and logic met.” This aphorism of the master must serve as my apology for including in one essay two topics so diverse, according to some opinions, as abstract political theory and concrete constitutional problems. It may be that the mediaeval jurists can provide a link between the two spheres, for their reflections on mediaeval government were not mere philosophical abstractions. They were rooted in real life. An essential ingredient of the jurists' raw material was a practical experience of the workings of mediaeval society. It is not surprising, therefore, that eminent historians on both sides of the Atlantic have called attention to the need for legal studies as a basis for further advance in mediaeval constitutional research, and that, in recent years, we have heard a great deal about the importance of feudal law and folk law, of Roman law and English common law in the formation of mediaeval ideas and institutions. My task will be to state briefly the case for the canonists.

The American Revolution was an event of particular interest to political theorists. Although it produced no thinkers to stand with Aristotle or even Locke and no book to be compared with The Republic or even The Prince, it was a high point in the long and fascinating career of the school of natural law. For this reason, the political theory of the Revolution deserves a more precise rendition than it has hitherto received. My purpose in this article is to do just that: to outline the theory of the Revolution for the benefit of political theorists and intellectual historians. Rather than quote from scattered sources, I shall attempt to express the general sense of the leaders of the Revolution. If one able Revolutionist had set himself consciously to express the political consensus of his time, to cast the principles of 1776 in a pattern for later ages to inspect and ponder, this might well have been the outline he would have chosen to follow—this was the political theory of the American Revolution:

The political and social world is governed by laws as certain and universal as those that govern the physical world. Whether these laws are direct commands of God, necessities of nature, or simply inescapable lessons of history makes very little practical difference. In any or all of these cases, men are guided and restricted by a moral order that they can defy but not alter. Revelation, reason, and experience, means through which men come to understand these laws, point out at least four instances in which they are applicable to the affairs of men. The higher law, or law of nature, is all of these things: