Anglospheric Continuity

The representative systems which sprang up as a part of the constitutional machinery of the several provincial states founded by English settlers upon American soil were in no proper sense the result of imitation. Like the states themselves of which they were a part, they were the predestined product of a natural process of reproduction. The constitutional history of these provincial states does not begin with the landing of the English in America in the seventeenth century, but with the landing of the English in Britain in the fifth.  The English emigrants who founded upon the eastern coast of what is now the United States a group of colonial commonwealths brought with them in their blood and bone, and in a matured form, that peculiar system of political organization which had been slowly developing in the mother country for centuries. They brought with them ready made the language, the law, the institutions of the old land to be modified and adapted to the changed conditions of the new. The settlements made by the English colonists in America in the seventeenth century were in all material particulars substantial reproductions of the English settlements made in Britain in the fifth. In both instances the settlers crossed the sea in ships in small companies, and in both lands they grouped themselves together in distinct and practically independent self-governing communities.

Hannis Taylor, The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, an Historical Treatise, In Which Is Drawn Out, By The Light Of The Most Recent Researches, The Gradual Development Of The English Constitutional System, And The Growth Out Of That System Of The Federal Republic Of The United States, in Two Volumes (1899)