The art of citizenshipmust be learned.

There are few places where English history hangs so thickly in the air as Westminster. In Westminster Abbey, kings have received the crown since 1066, and the dead of many centuries have gathered around them. Soldiers, poets, scientists, and statesmen lie within what remains, above all else, a Christian church. Across the road stands the Palace of Westminster. Most of what one sees is nineteenth-century, yet Barry and Pugin clothed Parliament in Gothic stone that recalled the older order from which the English constitution had grown. The effect was to present that constitution as an inheritance rather than an abstraction to be remade at will. Barry incorporated Westminster Hall into the new Palace. For almost seven centuries, the medieval hall stood at the center of the English legal system, while around it grew the courts, the offices of government, and the two Houses of Parliament.

The British Museum expresses another side of the Anglo-Saxon character. It is an attempt, grandiose and astonishing, to place the history of mankind within walking distance. Its galleries record the curiosity, acquisitiveness, and immense geographical reach of an imperial people.

Temple Church is smaller and more concentrated. Its round nave, modeled upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, made Jerusalem present in London. At Epiphany in 1215, King John and the rebel barons spent ten days negotiating at the Temple. They reached no settlement there, but the encounter belonged to the chain of events that led to Runnymede and Magna Carta that June. William Marshal, often remembered as the greatest knight who ever lived, mediated between king and barons. He helped secure the Charter and, as regent after John’s death, ensured its reissue. His effigy still lies in the Round Church. The precincts later became the heart of English common law as the home of Inner and Middle Temple. From there, English lawyers carried the common law and the Charter’s principles throughout Britain’s colonies and into the American republic.

The retreat ended, as civilized inquiry often should, over dinner. Rules has occupied Maiden Lane since 1798. Across ten reigns, generations have dined beneath walls crowded with the accumulated portraits and anecdotes of English life.

Over dinner, the group discussed Edmond Demolins’s Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due. Demolins was a French social reformer attempting to explain the energy of Britain and the United States. His answer began with the formation of character. The English boy, he argued, was trained early for independence. Younger sons had to make their own way. Practical occupations commanded respect. Voluntary associations performed work that France entrusted to officials and ministries.

Demolins called this a “particularistic” society. Its members habitually relied upon their own exertions and upon institutions they had formed themselves. His comparisons are often too sweeping, but the question beneath them remains formidable. How does a civilization produce men capable of carrying it forward?