haute inheritance que le roy ad; car par la ley il meme et toutes ses
sujets sont rules, et si la ley ne fuit, nul roy et nul inheritance
sera."[55] And in the Petition of Right Parliament makes the appeal that
the subjects have inherited their freedom through the laws.[56] The
laws, as the Act of Settlement expresses it, are the "birthright of the
people".[57]

And so we find only ancient "rights and liberties" mentioned in the
English laws of the seventeenth century. Parliament is always demanding
simply the confirmation of the "laws and statutes of this realm", that
is, the strengthening of the existing relations between king and people.
Of the creation of new rights there is not a word in all these
documents. Consequently there is no reference whatever to the important
fundamental rights of religious liberty, of assembling, of liberty of
the press, or of free movement. And down to the present day the theory
of English law does not recognize rights of this kind, but considers
these lines of individual liberty as protected by the general principle
of law, that any restraint of the person can only come about through
legal authorization.[58] According to the present English idea the
rights of liberty rest simply upon the supremacy of the law,--they are
law, not personal rights.[59] The theory, founded in Germany by Gerber,
and defended by Laband and others, according to which the rights of
liberty are nothing but duties of the government, sprang up in England,
without any connection with the German teaching, from the existing
conditions after the conception of the public rights of the individual
as natural rights, which was based on Locke and Blackstone, had lost its
power.

But with Locke even this conception stands in close connection with the
old English ideas. When Locke considers property--in which are included
life and liberty--as an original right of the individual existing
previous to the state, and when he conceives of the state as a society
founded to protect this right, which is thus transformed from a natural
to a civil right, he by no means ascribes definite fundamental rights to
the man living in the state, but rather places such positive
restrictions upon the legislative power as follow from the purposes of
the state.[60] When closely examined, however, these restrictions are
nothing else than the most important stipulations of the Bill of Rights,
which was enacted the year before the _Two Treatises on