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It may likewise be true, as some historians of the scientific school are now contending, that the framers of the Great Charter and the representatives of the English church, baronage and people gathered on the meadows at Runnymede on the 15th day of June, 1215, had little or no grasp of the science of politics or of constitutional principles as we understand them. It is probably true that they had no very definite conception of the theory of representative government, or of the separation of governmental powers, or of those inalienable rights of the individual which our Declaration of Independence was later to proclaim, just as it is probably true that very few of them could even read the language in which the charter was written. But statesmen and lawyers, in dealing with the practical problems of constitutional government, will not minimize the value of Magna Carta, and our debt to the generation that forced it from King John, merely because the underlying principles may not have been fully grasped by its framers and its traditions may be based on legends and myths. It is enough that the charter contained the germ and the spirit of civil liberty and political justice.