licated that an act of Parliament on the
subject may become a matter of great difficulty. It sometimes cannot
define with exactness, because the subject-matter will not bear an exact
definition. It may seem to _take away_ everything which it does not
positively _establish_, and this might be inconvenient; or it may seem,
_vice versa_, to _establish_ everything which it does not _expressly
take away_. It may be more advisable to leave such matters to the
enlightened discretion of a judge, awed by a censorial House of Commons.
But then it rests upon those who object to a legislative interposition
to prove these inconveniences in the particular case before them. For it
would be a most dangerous, as it is a most idle and most groundless
conceit, to assume as a general principle, that the rights and liberties
of the subject are impaired by the care and attention of the
legislature to secure them. If so, very ill would the purchase of Magna
Charta have merited the deluge of blood which was shed in order to have
the body of English privileges defined by a positive written law. This
charter, the inestimable monument of English freedom, so long the boast
and glory of this nation, would have been at once an instrument of our
servitude and a monument of our folly, if this principle were true. The
thirty-four confirmations would have been only so many repetitions of
their absurdity, so many new links in the chain, and so many
invalidations of their right.

You cannot open your statute-book without seeing positive provisions
relative to every right of the subject. This business of juries is the
subject of not fewer than a dozen. To suppose that juries are something
innate in the Constitution of Great Britain, that they have jumped, like
Minerva, out of the head of Jove in complete armor, is a weak fancy,
supported neither by precedent nor by reason. Whatever is most ancient
and venerable in our Constitution, royal prerogative, privileges of
Parliament, rights of elections, authority of courts, juries, must have
been modelled according to the occasion. I spare your patience, and I
pay a compliment to your understanding, in not attempting to prove that
anything so elaborate and artificial as a jury was not the work of
_chance_, but a matter of institution, brought to its present state by
the joint efforts of legislative authority and juridical prudence. It
need not be ashamed of being (what in many parts of it, at least, it is)
the of