ws, and thus induce the people to observe them, and the
juries to enforce them.

The general duties of the ancient parliaments were not legislative, but
judicial, as will be shown more fully hereafter. The _people_ were not
represented in the parliaments at the time of Magna Carta, but only the
archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and knights; so that little or
nothing would have been gained for liberty by Coke's idea that
parliament had a legislative power. He would only have substituted an
aristocracy for a king. Even after the Commons were represented in
parliament, they for some centuries appeared only as _petitioners_,
except in the matter of taxation, when their _consent_ was asked. And
almost the only source of their influence on legislation was this: that
they would sometimes refuse their consent to the taxation, unless the
king would pass such laws as they petitioned for; or, as would seem to
have been much more frequently the case, unless he would abolish such
laws and practices as they remonstrated against.

The _influence_ or power of parliament, and especially of the Commons,
in the general legislation of the country, was a thing of slow growth,
having its origin in a device of the king to get money contrary to law,
(as will be seen in the next volume,) and not at all a part of the
constitution of the kingdom, nor having its foundation in the consent of
the people. The power, _as at present exercised_, was not fully
established until 1688, (near five hundred years after Magna Carta,)
when the House of Commons (falsely so called) had acquired such
influence as the representative, _not of the people, but of the wealth,
of the nation_, that they compelled the king to discard the oath fixed
by the constitution of the kingdom; (which oath has been already given
in a former chapter,(page 101) and was, in substance, to preserve and
execute the Common Law, the Law of the Land,--or, in the words of the
oath, "_the just laws and customs which the common people had chosen_;")
and to swear that he would "govern the people of this kingdom of
England, and the dominions thereto belonging, _according to the statutes
in parliament agreed on_, and the laws and customs of the same."[115]

The passage and enforcement of this statute, and the assumption of this
oath by the king, were plain violations of the English constitution,
inasmuch as they abolished, so far as such an oath could abolish, the
legislative power of the kin